Ed Calderon traces Mexico’s cartel violence to the 1970s, when PRI-linked traffickers supplied heroin for U.S. troops during Vietnam, evolving into militarized factions using drones (pioneered in Mexico) and guerrilla tactics like execution videos and fuel theft—nearly four million gallons seized annually. He warns of U.S. military escalation risks uniting cartels against intervention, citing Operation Fast and Furious’s failed gun-tracking strategy and persistent conspiracy theories about CIA ties, including El Mayo Zambada’s alleged abduction by cartel operatives with possible U.S. involvement. Calderon also highlights Biden’s border policies fueling child trafficking and exploitation, contrasting them with Trump’s deportation figures (2.9 million total) while critiquing systemic racism in immigration enforcement. Despite cartel influence—now diversifying into fentanyl labs and TikTok recruitment—he argues Mexico’s economic potential outweighs conflict, stressing the need for nuanced solutions over military confrontation to avoid deeper instability. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, Aztec is a modern word for Mexica, which were a bunch of tribes that moved from Northern America down there.
And they brought with them a lot of customs, but I think those were around before them.
You know, a lot of them emulated animals.
So a lot of it was like shamanistic, people trying to inview themselves with the spirit of an animal.
So a lot of them, you know, have jaguar sounds coming out.
But some of the ones with the scream, apparently, they're more about the screeching owls that live down there.
But they've been like people told me, native people down there have told me that they were very much specifically kind of utilized for psychological effect.
During these flower wars they would have with the, I think, the classical Tecans, they had this agreement where they would go and try and capture people to bring back to the pyramid to sacrifice.
And a way they would, you know, tire them is to blow those at night where they were encamped or the places where they were about to attack.
And it's really crazy that most modern people don't even, I mean, especially in America, don't even understand that the reason why everybody speaks Spanish is because of the Spaniards.
It's not that the Mexican native language was Spanish.
No.
No, it was a language they assumed once they were conquered.
But when you look at it, I mean, they were just getting off their own conquest.
They were conquested by the Moors.
So they were getting free from that.
So they were already mixed in there.
They're brown people on that boat.
It's not blonde-haired white people coming on that boat.
There's already brown people on that boat coming.
Hernan Cortez is very much painted as a villain in this story.
But when you kind of look at the ways that the conquest took place in Mexico versus other parts of the world, there was a lot of brutality.
There's a lot of ignorance, a lot of religious nonsense on both sides because the Aztecs also did a lot of horrible things.
But in the end, I think Mexico went the route of mestizaje.
We decided to mix.
Like the Spanish decided to take wives among the natives.
They decided to give honorary titles to the people that helped fight the Aztecs to help with the conquest of what wasn't Mexico was just this valley at that time.
And it gave birth to this culture, this mixed culture that very much hates parts of itself, which is a weird part of Mexican culture.
Because you ask anybody in Mexico, a lot of people, and I went to Mexican school, so I got a lot of this education of how the evil Spanish came and wiped out all of the natives, you know, or most of the natives.
When in reality, a lot of us in Mexico have mixed blood.
Most of us have mixed blood.
There's a lot of Spanish blood in us.
So we were very much taught to hate ourselves in a way.
And I think that has something to do with a lot of the psychology and the culture in Mexico.
There's a whole part of our history and ourselves that we hate, but it's essential.
We say the president of Mexico, the past president, the current president, are all about sending the king of Spain letters to have him apologize for the conquista.
And it's funny, like some of the bloggers from Spain will respond, like, you're asking that in Spanish.
You know, I went to Chichen Itza, and first of all, you just, I mean, I know that the pyramids of Egypt dwarf even that, but when you go there, you're like, what happened?
We had a really good guide there when I went, and the guide was showing us this one area where they would take whatever psychedelic plants.
They had like some ceremonial room where they would take psychedelic plants.
And he was telling me that it's not totally understood what they were doing or why they were doing, but it is widely accepted that some of what they were into had to do with psychedelic rituals.
And he thinks that had a lot to do with why they were able to make these kind of insanely complex structures.
And a weird thing that I've also kind of like realized after just talking to people and going down there and kind of seeing some of the artifacts, a lot of the psychedelics that they actually took were self-harm and mutilation, bloodletting type activities.
Which a lot of people in Mexico are now, oh, it's a big exaggeration.
It's like a propaganda denial.
And then you go there and there's like stone skull piles commemorating whatever war and depictions of them in CODICs that they themselves made of just getting sacrificed people on top of pyramids, pulling out their hearts.
Even the way that in the art it's depicted, you can't fake that.
Most people would think you'd go through the rib cage to get at the heart.
But no, they go through the diaphragm right down here.
So that's why there's a lot of depictions of some of these gods, like Mikan Tlicutli, which is the lord of the underworld in the Aztecs.
Sometimes it's depicted with a skeletal form with its hands spread out like this, and you'll see a split diaphragm on the bottom coming out underneath its ribcage as a signifier that, you know, that's...
And again, I imagine that a lot of these things, I mean, you have to interpret because there are things out there that I don't understand.
But I know blood was very essential, and it was an essential thing for these cultures.
It's one of the most powerful offerings you can make.
And a lot of the Catholic side of things that came into the country, that came into this area just intermingled perfectly.
They were also talking about a god that look at those skulls in the corner right next to your cursor, Jimmy, in the middle there.
Right there.
Where the capital of Mexico is right now, there's a big cathedral behind it.
There's the Templo Mayor, the major temple of the Aztec Empire.
And there's a lot of those types of symbologies around just skulls, because that's where they would have the Sempantli, I think it's called.
Sorry if I butchered the word.
They would have these racks of skulls on top of the pyramids, on top of their central pyramid, kind of displaying all of the people that had gone off it.
see where the blood was was uh channeled to drip down from that i think i think i think this is i'm not sure if this is the one but there was one stone where they would tie somebody onto the stone and he would fight several people until he finally died true It's like a, I don't know, it's like a sacrifice of a fighting sacrifice.
People keep denying that that actually happened, but it's we like I think it's the same phenomenon you get in the U.S. where all of Native Americans were like peaceful and it was like a utopia before they came in.
And this is not, in terms of America, our understanding of Mexico and cartel culture, this is not something that was ever talked about when I was in high school.
I think the first time people started getting an inkling of this was in the 90s when the phenomenon of this guy, Adolfo Constanzo, happened.
This was on the border between Texas and Juarez area.
He was, they called him the Narco Satanico, the Satanist narc.
He was a high-level practitioner of something called Palo and Santeria.
And he would do rituals for people, like in cartels.
And he started his own cartel because he was pretty successful at social engineering and folk magic, basically, is what he was doing.
And at some point, he started believing in his power, and he instructed some of the members of his gang to abduct an American because he needed a brain for his cauldron where he would do some of these rituals.
And I think that's the first time Americans got a little like a small glimpse of the underground brutality, monster, religious occultism, and just torture and murder that has been going on down there for many years.
But it has gotten really bad in the past 20, 30 years.
I think the 70s, 70s and 80s is when we start seeing the formation of the first large organizations and federations that are working to produce and or to traffic substances through Mexico up into the United States.
They were planting poppy in the Sierra for the war effort, apparently, for the Americans, because they were running out of shortage of morphine, so they needed a place to plant it.
And that's one of the places where they kind of started like, oh, they can grow this here.
That's where all the gender pronouns get issued into law.
That's where violence against women specifically.
And feminicide is now a new thing catalogued under the law.
You can kill a dude, you're slide, but if you kill a woman, that's feminicide, which is way worse.
So that's where a lot of that policy comes from.
And then northern Mexico, where I'm from, that's where, I guess, I don't know, conservative, that's where all the factories are.
That's where all the people, the hardworking people and people that kind of like go the other side of the politics that are woke.
That used to be the case, but now Moreno's ruling all over the country.
And a lot of the policy they're bringing with them are to the left.
Mexico was very tired from the drug war that it had been going on for 20 years, that I was a part of for 12 of those years.
They saw Felipe Calderón bring the military into this fight to fight the cartels and just kicking a giant beehive.
He had realistically, he really didn't have a clue what he was about to kind of kick off.
He had the idea that if you just put the military out, which are not corrupted, well, he thought they were not corrupted, and you militarized a lot of the policing going on around it, you can eliminate all these cartel members.
Like, oh, just this guy's gone, this guy's gone, and we're going to just now secure this area in control.
But it's been just basically gremlins, you know.
One gremlin will turn into four or five.
You cut one head off, and it's a Hydra.
Just a bunch of heads come out now.
So Mexico has been going through that for a while.
And then this president comes in, Manuel Lopez Ovador, with this plan.
Like, we'll just leave him alone.
And they'll stop.
Violence will stop because we'll stop fighting them.
How'd that work?
He has one of the most violent presidencies in history.
His main, he criticizes Calderon, who started this drug war over his handling of it.
He outmatches him from death during his administration.
What we saw in his administration was the politicalization, and they were already in politics, but now they're really overt about it.
Now cartels are like, they have their own candidates running for office.
The mayor of a city and the police chief of the city, they're all cartel members.
And the police force, they're all cartel members in parts of Mexico.
Oh, boy.
All of the political killings that happen in Mexico don't happen because there's a bunch of John F. Kennedys out there that are trying to change things, right?
It's because that cartel is sponsoring that candidate.
And this cartel is sponsoring that candidate.
So I don't want your candidate to win, so I'm going to go shoot him.
And we like to think that we're innocent over here, but how much different is it with what we do with pharmaceutical drug companies sponsoring people?
Because they pay for people's campaigns, and those people get in with a specific understanding of what kind of laws you need to push through, what kind of mandates you need to make in terms of mandating the use of certain medications.
And it is a clear sign that whatever division people had in their heads about the cartels are this organization here, and they're not openly at least involved in any of this political stuff.
And no, all that shit's gone.
Something happened.
Something happened last year.
The arrest of one of the biggest cartel heads in history from Mexico, Elmayo Sambada.
He was arrested in Texas.
He flew into a private air.
They flew him into a private airfield under pretty interesting circumstances and then he handed himself over to the authorities.
El Mayo gets brought into a meeting in Sinaloa by Joaquin, who is he's not one of the drugs.
He's not one of the powerful brothers of the Chapo Guzman brothers that are in the drug trade.
He's kind of like wanting out, basically.
So at some point, he cuts a deal.
And in this deal, he said, I'm going to get this guy on a plane and I'm going to fly him over, you know, and we're going to make a deal.
That's the story.
He has him, he has El Mayo coming to a meeting between the governor of Sinaloa, which is known publicly.
People know this.
The governor of Sinaloa was going to be in the meeting with Elmayo Sambado, the head of Sinaloa Cartel, who is a member of Morena, the current ruling party all over the country.
Also, no investigation.
Also, he's still in power, which is shady as fuck.
Between him and a man named Gwen, who was, I think he was the director of the university there.
They had some sort of political dispute, and Elmaya was being brought in to, I don't know, negotiate or like influence that, which tells you a lot about how the cartels and politics and the universities are tied, right?
At that meeting, Nemesia Quen, who is Gwen, who is a friend of Elmayo, the guy who's the director of the university, gets killed.
They shoot him.
There's a video published of a gas station shootout where supposedly this man who was the director of the university gets killed.
But it's fucking made up by the state prosecutor.
They're trying to make this shit go away.
Meanwhile, all this stuff starts unraveling.
Oh, they abducted El Mayo at that meeting, and that's why they killed this guy.
We don't know, or at least I don't know if there's any specific confirmation that the governor of Sinaloa was there.
But he said he went to the U.S., he was in the U.S., he wasn't there, but there's no travel logs of him being in the U.S. It's a shit's a shit show.
They somehow overtake his bodyguards, El Mayo's bodyguards.
They're gone.
Nobody knows where they went.
Probably dead somewhere.
Got El Mayo on a plane and flew him into Texas.
Homeland Security was apparently involved.
FBI says that they may have been involved.
But last time I was here, I was talking about at some point we're going to see either a direct U.S. intervention or military action in Mexico that's going to kick off things.
When this war kicked off between these two factions in Sinaloa, schools closed.
People didn't want to go out because their cars were going to get jacked to get burned and put in the middle of the street.
Companies closed.
All of the luxury environment around these criminal organizations that they built up.
I mean, these were criminal organizations that had Louis Vuitton stores and Glikon, you know, and exotic exotic cars being sold in these dealerships and all of the bands that would play live music at their places and all these exotic seafood places.
All these places just how are they going to sustain themselves now?
This economy started crashing.
And the Mexican government comes out, the president, the Presidenta, the current president, Shane Baum, comes out, and She blames this state being on fire, the U.S. like the U.S. came in here and abducted El Mayo Sambada, a Mexican national.
And they charge Joaquin Guzman, who was involved in the operation, to pick up El Mayo.
They charge him with high treason in Mexico for abducting Elmaya Sambada and putting him in the U.S., which is he's charged with high treason.
We talked to a kid that was six months out of working with what is currently, I think, priority number one, should be priority number one for the U.S., the new generation cartel.
This militarized cartel out of Jalisco that has been with this war going on between the Sinala factions.
I mean, it's Christmas for them.
So when we went down there, he introduced us to this kid who was freshly off.
He was involved in tank warfare on the borders between Jalisco and Sacatecas against those Mayos who you see there firing at those houses.
Tanks.
They're making their own tanks.
If you get your truck stolen up here and probably gets driven to Mexico, they're going to make a tank out of it, probably.
They're making these artisanally made tanks, basically.
Mostly what they are are.
Yeah.
That's a pretty old one.
I think that's from the Zeta period.
That's cool, though.
It looks like a fucking Mad Max vehicle.
But what they do is they make these tanks.
And his job was to be in the back of one of these with a 50-cal rifle.
So what they do is you'll get into a dirt road and they'll put their trucks like this with their backs turned.
And I was like, why don't you just ram them with the front?
The engine will go out.
You have to ram them with the back of the truck.
So they'll just go into like this destruction derby in the hills and shoot at each other until there's a clear winner is what they did.
They do basically.
And their main weapons are 50 caliber rifles.
So they'll be in the back of the truck and they're like, now, now, now.
And they'll just, somebody's on radio inside the cabin trying to call out what's going on.
This kid walked us through how he was all the way from his recruitment through his training through this tank warfare thing that they sent him on.
And now into his life where he was like, why I laughed about your question about hearing protection is I was the first person that showed him what tinnitus was and what hearing loss was because he kept like, what did you say?
It's like, hey, dude, do you have hearing loss?
Like, no, like, I just, you know, like, dude, you have severe hearing loss from what you went through.
He gets driven to one of these ranches, these training camps.
And it's not like, you know, I remember seeing the Al-Qaeda training camps where the guys are on the monkey bars and stuff like that.
These are military compounds that are in the Sierras in the mountains.
There was a case recently where they thought they found these mass graves that turned out to be actually training camps.
There were dead people there, but they found all these shoes that Mexican, they were calling Mexican Auschwitz.
But what they actually found is a processing space.
Like you go there and they strip off all your clothes and your shoes and they leave them there because they give you new shoes because they don't want to be tracked.
So it was one of those processing places.
So you end it, and then you then end up in some of the training camps.
He describes active duty military personnel training them in the hills.
Mexican military personnel training them in the hills.
There's rumors, and again, I have not talked directly to anybody that knows of that, that had eyes on them, but there are rumors of at least two American specialists of some sort, because I've heard Delta Force and SEALs, and I don't know.
But there is a clear communication of methods and technology.
IEDs are a thing in Mexico now.
Like IEDs are very reminiscent of things that you would see in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And the only way that they come over here is not from an Afghani or an Iraqi coming over and showing us how to do IEDs.
It was probably an EOD tech of some sort from the U.S. that has some experience that doesn't know how to make some of these.
That's one place where they were learning their tradecraft.
Another one is Colombia.
Colombian operators have been showing up in weird parts of the world fighting.
I mean, they're in the Ukrainian war right now, learning about drone technology.
Some of the operators from Mexico that went to fight in the Ukrainian front are now back in Mexico showing the cartels what they learned about drone warfare in the Ukraine war.
Because it's, it's, I mean, it's like, I say it's like the military, but they'll kill you there if you fucking fuck up or they'll beat, you know, or they'll beat you, flog you.
It is a job.
It is like a structured job.
You get a, you get, you get money paid to you every quincena, every 15 days, and a bonus at the end of the month.
You get equipment.
You know, you get selected for certain activities.
He was selected for tank duty and they send him on his fucking tank to fight in the hills.
Some people get selected to manage some of their drugstores.
Some people get managed to just be lookouts.
But it's a giant network of people that they've managed to create for themselves in this region, this new generation cartel.
It's one of the largest and fastest growing cartels in Mexico, and it is now probably operating all over Mexico.
But he's one in a thousand, thousands of kids like that out there who've gone through some of these things, both on the military and police side and also the cartel side.
Highly traumatized individuals.
But there's nothing for them down there.
If they talk about what they did, they're in trouble.
If they look for help, there's no help out there.
So this kid is trying to reform his life with all this fucking damage in him.
He lost his family that he fought so much to get back to.
Which is, you know, it's one small story and tragedy of, but you go to Jalisco and they have a roundabout there in Jalisco.
It's Lodes Aparacillos where the missing are.
And it's covered in posters of missing people in Walajara.
It is like one of those zombie movies where they have all these, like the, where all the missing people posters on the zombie outbreak happened.
It's like that, except it's people.
Over 100,000, according to official numbers in Mexico, as far as missing.
Just gone.
And that's another aspect of this war that people don't kind of like realize.
The numbers are skewed, you know, because there's no confirmed dead person for a number of the amount of people murdered if there's no body.
And Mexico has become very good at getting rid of bodies.
like cultures in Mexico.
I was in Kohuila working with a tactical group out there.
They showed me, I mean, I'm always learning from people.
Different regions have different ways of getting rid of bodies.
Some just burn them, just throw fuel on them to see if they can burn.
In this part of the country, Cohila, which is on the east side of the country, they will heat up fuel drums with diesel inside of them.
And diesel can get really hot without igniting.
And that's where they put the bodies inside.
Basically boil them down to their essential essence.
And there's nothing to find, is what they tell me with that process.
You go to my hometown of Tijuana, that's where we have.
Yeah.
And then you go to Tijuana, where I'm from, and then you got the phenomenon of Posolero, who would get rid of people with caustic soda, just a mixture of chemicals that you could find at a hardware store, and they would make people into pink slurry, and just dump the pink slurry in a hole and just cover it up.
So the numbers that we see as far as dead and missing, it's not a real number.
It has to be bigger.
It is a place where you'll go into some towns and there's just a bunch of old men and females because all the men are gone, you know?
Or you'll see these abandoned graves in someplace.
I talked to a lady who's a part of some of these.
There's these organizations all over the country right now.
They're grassroots organizations that are basically just dedicated to finding clandestine body disposal places.
They're looking for their family members, basically.
You have this cartel now that is, you know, you have El Mayo Sambada's gone.
El Chapo's sons are cutting a deal.
One of them apparently has made an alliance with the head of the new generation cartel, a man by El Mencho.
His nickname is El Mencho.
Nemesio Seguada Cervantes is his real name.
Last time I was here, there was like this almost five years ago that I was here.
There were questions about if he was even alive or not.
People thought that he was being kept alive as this folk figure because he's low-key, very low-key, he's not flashy.
Everything's militarized.
He's very good at his tradecraft.
But recently, he's very much alive.
He's very much exposed himself a few times.
He was almost arrested recently, and the federal police apparently tipped off his security about the operation against him.
It's the second time he was almost arrested.
He's the biggest target right now in Mexico.
We recently learned through the media of Trump's authorization of utilizing military action in Latin America in general, all the way from Venezuela all the way up to Mexico.
And you hear these rumblings of like, how is this military operation going to look like?
Is this going to be an invasion?
Are we going to see a column of U.S. Marines driving down to Tijuana?
We're probably going to spend some time in Tijuana.
It's probably not a good idea.
Are we going to see people, Delta Force guys, showing up in Tijuana and Culiacan and going on a raid on their own without permission of the local authorities?
What's this going to look like?
I don't see a direct trust between Mexico and the United States anymore.
There's issues there.
The U.S. has realized that politics are compromised at high level in Mexico.
Completely.
With the example of the recent almost arrest of Nemesio Sega Cervantes Lamencho, you see that the federal forces are compromised as well.
So who do you trust as an American force that is trying to cut the stem of drugs into this country is kind of the excuse that they're utilizing for this designation.
And who do you trust down there?
I posted, I'm friends with a bunch of dorks, and they're all looking at flight tracker and intelligence and stuff like that.
And I'm a dork too.
And one of them sent me this suspicious drone, American drone flying over the state of Mexico in circles.
And I posted it immediately.
I think I was one of the first ones to post it online.
And a press briefing happened almost immediately.
And the head of public safety in Mexico, Omar Gasier Jarfu, said, like, oh, yeah, this is, we asked for this drone to fly over this area.
Who did you ask?
This is not a military drone, but we asked for it to fly over this area.
Which I don't think he knows what's fucking going on.
I don't think he knows why there's a drone flying over a very specific part of Mexico.
I don't know.
It seemed like he didn't.
Or either he didn't want to reveal this drone.
But there have been many times recently of drones just flying close to the border or over Mexico.
They're clearly drawing a map, an intelligence map of targets in Mexico.
So something is coming, I think.
Whoa.
But what is it going to look like, though?
The question that people are asking.
I don't know.
Speaking to somebody like Gafe down in Mexico, he was a former member of the Special Operations.
And I asked him, like, hey, what is the military going to do with the U.S. says, like, we're going in without your approval?
He said, well, if you start fighting the cartels without approval of the Mexican government, you will turn criminal organizations into freedom fighters.
And they're already integrated into the military in certain ways because some of them are working for them and some of them are working for us.
So you will make the whole a cohesive force against you.
Oh, boy.
Which is an interesting theory, you know, if that happens.
And in Mexico, he has been turned into this very clear enemy.
Like, this is the enemy, you know?
Specifically by politicians down there.
He's pretty easy to just vilify.
Like, it's his fault.
Why is Sinaloa on fire?
Maybe it's because you have a corrupt governor there who was clearly in cartel ties and stuff like that, who's part of your party, but you haven't figured out how to get him out of office.
Maybe it's that.
Or no, it's the U.S. because they abducted El Mayo.
That's why they charge somebody with high treason, which is unheard of, but there you go.
So like, who are you going to trust in that realm?
And so Mexico has pressed the whole, the U.S. is responsible for this.
And they're kind of wiping their hands from it.
And the U.S. keeps pointing their finger at the high-level government, which is something, again, five years ago, I spoke about this on this podcast, and I got a lot of shit for it.
I said, there's no way of going after cartels in Mexico without going after the government because they're one and the same in a lot of places.
And that's why you have a lot of conflicts happening in routes that are leading towards the border.
The Sina Law cartel operated in a very old-fashioned way.
You know, they wouldn't shit.
No cagas on the comas.
It was their politics.
Don't shit where you eat was their politics for a long time.
You saw a change in this when the brutality aspect and how just shit changed in Mexico.
There was an incident.
Members of Los Arellano Felix cartel, the Tijuana cartel, were in a direct conflict with elements of El Chapo, Guzman's organization.
And they had an assassin.
They had an assassin basically infiltrate the living circle of one of El Chapo's main guys, Eluero Palma.
And he seduced his wife, killed her, and abducted his kids and threw them off a bridge and sent that video to El Huero Palma.
And I think after, I mean, brutal shit had happened after that, before that, but I think that set off this.
At some point, that whole war that happened, you know, you start getting the element of the Zetas coming in who were former special operator guys who basically said like, we can start our own cartel, which a lot of them were Fort Bragg-trained individuals that went down.
Some of them went through the Green Beret course.
Foreign nationals go through that course a lot.
So they went to the Green Beret course and then they go back to Mexico.
And then as soon as they get back to Mexico, it's like, oh, congratulations on your cool Green Beret and all this training.
Come train our guys or come work for us.
So at some point, all of this started militarizing the conflict in Mexico.
It went from gang against gang violence, which is like very reminiscent of some of the stuff that happened up here during the gang era or some of the Al Capon era, you know, shootouts between people.
The Zetas changed the game.
They started bringing in guerrilla warfare tactics into this realm.
They started doing all of those torture videos and cartel execution videos.
That comes from them.
They realized that part of a guerrilla warfare campaign is propaganda.
And how can you make propaganda of shooting a guy in a field?
They started realizing that, yeah, it's one thing having a kid with sneakers on the back of a truck with an AK whose dad was part of the organization and he brought his kid in.
But it's probably a better idea to have militarized or paramilitary groups working with us.
So they started getting these evolutions of ideas of what a criminal organization should be.
And all of that, the members of the new generation cartel that are now kind of like dominating Mexico started off as a Zeta hunting force that the Zeno Law cartel formed in Jalisco.
And they said like, well, we can do this for ourselves now too as well.
So that's how they originated in a lot of ways.
So this organization has taken the textbook learning process of all these other cartels and is now this cartel with all this foundation, educational foundation, as far as how to set up an organization, how to set up all these transnational routes, how to operate on both sides of the border, how to augment their capabilities constantly through technology.
Drone warfare was first seen, I think, in Mexico.
You saw drones dropping bombs and shit like that in Mexico before the Ukrainian conflict.
But they got really good at it.
The Ukrainians have fucking taken that shit to an armed form.
There are Mexican nationals fighting for their foreign services, their foreign brigades in the Ukraine.
And some of them have gone into that route, drone operators.
And some of them are coming back.
And you started seeing this sudden sophistication.
It used to be bomblets dropped from these commercial drones and the explosives in them were probably mining-level explosives.
You start seeing these bomblets made, and they were more reminiscent of Colombian explosives or IRA-era explosives.
And now you're seeing these coordinated drone attacks on military forces in Mexico.
I think they recently got a job.
Some high-level army official, they got him with a drone.
They didn't kill him, but they almost killed him.
So you started seeing these drones now being operated as scouts.
So you can't get close to them because these drones are in the sky.
So now you're seeing drone cartels fighting against other cartel drones.
So now we're seeing cartel guys with these futuristic drone anti-drone guns in the field.
They look like space guns, but in the hands of a cartel guy wearing sandals, which is what the fuck's going on with these people.
So you start seeing all this augmentation of capabilities.
This single cartel now has all of this history behind it, all of these lessons behind it, all this training behind it, all this technology.
And it is poised to punch a hole right through its territory and go up north into the United States.
There are no segments of the border wall currently that are actually controlled or a city that is controlled by the new generation cartel that is on the border.
That's not the case now.
But there are places that are starting to maybe look like they're going that way.
Tijuana being one of them, where I'm from.
You start seeing the last remaining sons of Ochapa Guzman that are free.
Archival is the strongest one.
And his faction of those Chapitos, as what they call themselves, this past year announced that they had reached an alliance with this new cartel, the new generation cartel.
So now it's a cohesive force, and they had historical ties and a part of the border that they owned already that they inherited from their dad.
So that nightmare scenario of having this cartel now having a clear doorway into the United States is pretty close if it's not there already.
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And how wild would it be if the border was still wide open?
You know, this arrest of Amano Sambada, this designation that allows a lot of safety's off type thing against some of these cartels.
What's worrying in the eyes of Mexico and in the eyes of Mexicans, I guess, the fact that there was a promise of no negotiating with terrorists, or at least it's something that is assumed.
You don't negotiate with terrorists.
It's like a thing.
But all of a sudden, one of these factions just made a deal and they're negotiating with them.
And now all these people are crossing that border.
Their family members are crossing that border and now in the safety of the United States.
The dude that the United States made a deal with is responsible for the death of a few special operators that were a part of his arrest.
What are they going to tell their families of that loss and why they died?
And also the piles of bodies that were around after both of his arrest attempts.
So there's distrust on all sides.
Mexicans don't trust the government to solve it because it's a bit— What's your deal with your president?
seize nearly four million gallons of stolen fuel ap news this has been going on for years and again this is another part of the way they finance themselves and these criminal organizations have been able to grow without Yeah, they branch out.
I think we're at a tipping point where the Mexican culture in general is sick of it.
It doesn't want this yet anymore.
We're seeing attacks on freedom of expression in Mexico in a way because some of these popular singers that would sing cartel songs are now banned from performing them live.
So that's like an attack on freedom of speech.
But population is pretty cool with it, though.
They're letting it slide.
So it means that they're kind of like ready to give up shit.
I mean, again, I talked about how if you're going to attack these organizations, you have to attack all of these.
Just like you attack al-Qaeda, you attack who finances them who.
And a lot of these organizations were basically utilizing some of these popular singers to launder money or to gain influence in the U.S. or to sing about their exploits.
They would pay them to sing about their exploits.
So when this designation came down, it was clear that some of these guys were on the chopping block.
This terrorist designation came down from the government.
The U.S. government, it's clear that some of these singers are going to be on the chopping block.
He used to hang out with El Maya Sambada and El Chapa Guzman and talk about it openly on podcast in Mexico.
And, you know, that's another phenomenon that's currently happening.
YouTubers.
Since it was so normalized in Mexico, just a bunch of YouTubers started popping up like, I'm a cartel YouTuber.
I'm going to talk about cartel stuff on YouTube.
And they've been getting when When the Chapitos and the Mayos started fighting over Sinaloa, those Mayos put a plane up and started dispersing pamphlets with pictures of all the YouTube influencers that they knew were helping out the Chapitos faction or they were working with them.
And they've been going down that list.
They recently killed one dude at his house who was talking about cartels.
Just like doing really quick math in my head of like approximations of how many new generation cartel members are apparently out there, which there's no real way of knowing, but there are the formulations.
I mean, there's the people fighting out there, the people in charge, the people settling up shop, the people in finance, the people that are running the shell companies, the people that are running the actual companies because these cartels own companies, you know?
My participation in all of this was I was in Mexico and a bunch of my friends got killed with those guns.
Wow.
We started see, just imagine, I'm in my 20s back then.
And, you know, we get in shootouts and people are running around with guns and stuff like that.
It's mostly like AR-15s, AK-47s.
Some of them are really rusty and old.
Norenko rifles from China, just weird firearms.
And all of a sudden, you start finding people with 50-caliber Barrett rifles with scopes on them, zeroed in in the box with munitions, and then you look at the box where they came in and you see a label that says Arizona on it.
And you're like, you know, that's a weird thing to find on this fucking crack house that we're at.
And then a few of my friends got killed with these FN57 pistols.
It's a high-velocity round that comes in them.
It was kind of fabricated in the Cold War to fight Russians invading Europe, and they wanted to be able to penetrate their body armor with small pistols and small subguns that they might have in urban areas.
So we started seeing those.
And just a massive amount of firearms being delivered specifically to the senior law cartel groups in the area that we're working with.
And we didn't know anything about it.
Like, where are all these things coming from?
Apparently, in the U.S., during the Bush administration, they started an operation that was meant to track firearms being straw purchased in places like Arizona and other parts of the U.S. by individuals being gathered by cartel members, put into cars, and then driven down to Mexico to supply the cartels.
The ATF was involved in all this.
Eric Holder was very involved in all this.
Their plan or theory was we're going to track these guns when they go down to Mexico.
But nothing got tracked, or at least we don't know of anything that got really tracked or any high-level arrest made because of the guns that they were just allowed to.
Why would they want to destabilize them in such an immoral way that they needed this to happen so badly they were willing to give them weapons to kill each other?
I mean, back then, it was a senior law cartel trying to fight control over the area over some people that were coming in like the Zed does and other organizations.
And I don't know why would you send guns to this specific region?
I'm not saying that the U.S. purposely armed a single cartel in Mexico.
And this is what we saw because, you know, a lot of the things that they were requesting, because it looked like a laundry list.
Some of the stuff that they were bringing down.50 cal why do you think 50 calibers started getting like were so hot back and still are so hot it's because people started doing armor so they need a way to get getting through armor so 50 calories right and americans especially some of my american military and police friends are always making fun of the fact that none of these big ass rifles have any sights on them they do have sights on them but they get stolen by the cops before they put them in front of the picture for the news but
I've heard it wasn't me that makes sense you got a nice expensive red dot on that fuck you these guys don't even have sights on their guns they can shoot far they can shoot well if they've got expensive guns of course they've got sights but everything gets stripped off donations these started showing up in Mexico a bunch of people started
dying and then two federal agents that were doing protection detail died down there during a cartel shootout I'm not too sure on the details of this but they were involved in a shootout in Mexico they were doing a protection detail down there one of them was a border patrol agent assigned to this Ryan Terry they set up a foundation in his memory I think I raised a few grand for this foundation and I did that only as a point to be able to say yeah
yeah I raised this money for this foundation to honor this fallen police officer that was going that was in Mexico that was killed by American guns that were given to the cartels to bring attention to the fact that you know we know who Ryan Terry is but do we know who my friends are who were killed by these guns or a lot of the unknown people that were killed by some of these guns that were allowed to walk through that border knowingly by ATF officials even though the people running these gun shops were we're like, hey, dude, are you sure?
So, if you had to imagine, no one's saying this is true, but if you had to imagine what kind of a deal would be made where you would guarantee the shipment of weapons from the United States into Mexico by the federal government for what purpose?
But Elmayo Sambada learned his tradecraft in Los Angeles 50 years ago.
And one of the people that was instrumental in showing him how to run drugs and move things through countries was a man who was a Castro-era police officer who was involved in the Bay of Pig incidents.
That man married his Elmayo's sister, and that's who taught Elmayo Sambada everything he knew about moving things around.
And that same Contra situation pops up again with the death of Kiki Kamarena, the DEA agent.
One of the people, one of the, there was two major prisoner extraditions of cartel members from Mexico to the U.S. And the first one that came through, I think, a year ago was the apparent murderer of Kiki Kamarena, who was a cartel member.
And they've always pinned it on him.
The cartels were, there was this giant grove of marijuana out there and that Kiki Amarena saw it and reported it.
And Caro Quintero, who owned this plantation, had him killed.
Right.
And we actually went down to Jalisco where he was tortured and killed and talked to the locals there.
I will tell you, Director Deutsch, as a former Los Angeles police narcotics detective, that the agency has dealt drugs throughout this country for a long time.
I have watchtower documents heavily redacted by the agency.
I was personally exposed to CIA operations and recruited by CIA personnel who attempted to recruit me in the late 70s to become involved in protecting agency drug operations in this country.
I have been trying to get this out for 18 years, and I have the evidence.
My question for you is very specific, sir.
If in the course of the IG's investigations and Fred Hitz's work, you come across evidence of severely criminal activity and it's classified.
Will you use that classification to hide the criminal activity, or will you tell the American people the truth?
Jamie, find the trailer for that movie they did with him.
So they were interviewing him.
I forget what the entire premise of this thing was.
They were interviewing him for something.
And he was so intense, they decided to do an entire movie of just Michael Rupert sitting in a chair in like a warehouse, smoking cigarettes and talking about the collapse of the global economy.
It's like Mexico's UFOs are, it's always been like, Mexico's bigfoot is CIA.
Like there have been, Manuel Bendi, I think, was a writer in the 60s, 70s.
He would talk about the CIA and he got shot.
Like recently, in the past 10 years, a bunch of CIA documents have come out of Mexican presidents being on the payroll by the CIA from all the Cold War era presidents were CIA agents on the payroll.
So Mexico has this vision of the CIA and the U.S.'s responsibility for some of the things that are going on down there that are very different than the U.S.'s perception of responsibilities.
It was shocking to me when we were there at Kiki coming in, the house where he was kept and I think tortured and finally killed that the people around there that have lived there when it happened some of them would call that the CIA house.
So that was a weird thing.
And maybe they've been kind of like polluted by all the stuff they've been looking at or seeing after that happened.
yeah and also makes I wonder how much of an influence it has in our drug laws the Because sensible drug laws would treat all drugs the same way we treat alcohol.
When I left the studio the last time, you're still in LA.
My marriage ended around that same time.
And I had a few things going on.
PTSD and trying to figure things out and drinking myself to sleep every third day because it's the only way I can go through a sleepless, through a dreamless night was unsustainable.
So my life was falling apart and I had to like do something.
I had a friend who owns a big ranch and he had a cabin that I could stay in.
He said, hey, you can stay here.
How long did it take to I got there and I didn't want to feel like a freeloader so I got there and I gave them, they had a little small community school there for the kids.
So I brought a TV and like DVDs and like gave them all this stuff.
The you know, the the perfect storm was The outbreak of the prescription opioid epidemic in this country.
That was like this initiation of what later turned into like, oh, well, this is off the table now because we passed all these laws and didn't put some people in jail.
They should have that should be in prison, some families that I don't know how they're free.
Yeah.
But then what takes its place?
Somewhere in Mexico, people were growing poppies and they said, well, let's add a little bit of fentanyl into these very weak poppy yields of heroin and see what it does.
And it kicked.
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Oh, so that was the source of it, that the heroin was weak?
And also, wheat legalization in parts like California led to interesting phenomenons.
Some of these fields were no longer profitable.
So they would switch to poppy.
And one thing that people don't realize is that a lot of these things get tested out first in the markets in Mexico because Mexico has giant drug markets that are fought over.
And you see some of these cartels publicly claim, like, ah, we don't deal in this fentanyl thing.
This is not us.
Fentanyl as a whole, I think, in the U.S. is kind of down.
And I know that not all of it or not most of it is now coming from Mexico.
I mean, you'll get pill shipments of fentanyl pills coming from Mexico, a lot of those.
But you also get fentanyl from in the mail all over the U.S. There's a loophole that is finally being closed about exporting things into the United States.
So if they're below $800 or something like that, they don't get the full scan.
So I know for a fact there are cartels or groups of people in the United States organizing, shipping things to the United States that have fentanyl in them and they started loading and they're selling fentanyl loaded substances into the U.S. without any sort of cartel or Mexican involvement.
When COVID hit, these precursors started getting really rare for some of these organizations, specifically the Senior Law cartel was actually getting their fentanyl in the U.S. from some of the last shipments that they were receiving in the ports in the U.S. because the U.S. kept the ports open for a bit longer.
So you had cases of people, cartel members, getting caught with fentanyl, smuggling into Mexico because they didn't get their regular supply from China from the regular ports.
And that's what they were utilizing to infuse the drugs that they would send over to the U.S. But the one that didn't have any of those issues was the new generation cartel because they own a lot of the ports on both sides of the country.
And also they've always had, I don't know, this I don't want to say that the People's Republic of China purposely has been sending fentanyl or has been turning a blind eye to all this phenomenon as a way to fuck with the U.S. It's probably the case though.
I was watching some video that some guy made about Maine, about there's this town in Maine, but there's all these Chinese nationals living there, and they've taken over weed operations in Maine.
When we talked about Vietnam, I think Mexico is a weird Vietnam in a lot of ways because you see foreign influences in Mexico in different ways.
The current administration is very close with Venezuela and Cuba, which are enemies of the United States.
They're pretty friendly with them.
So that's one influence in the country.
All of these precursors and supplies, and all of these involve Chinese chemist, industrialist individuals.
A lot of the cartels were basically hiding their money through Chinese banking institutions.
That's the way you hide money from the U.S. You take it to a Chinese money broker.
He puts it in the Chinese banking institution.
You go to Mexico.
You have a shell company down there or a real company down there.
And then you hire investments with that Chinese company.
Now you have legitimate money just transferring from one end to the other and nobody the wiser.
So Mexico is a war is a war field or a battle.
A battle is being played out in Mexico that has a lot to do with the United States and affecting the interests of the United States.
And China is clearly not the U.S.'s friend in this battle, probably.
And things have changed.
The dynamics have changed.
But you can clearly see that at some point, people in China, and when it's I've heard people say that the largest intelligence organization in the world is the Chinese, the Chinese government, because everybody in China is part of the intelligence apparatus, basically.
So it's hard for me to believe that all these industrialists and all these chemists come to Mexico and show these cartel members how to cook, manufacture, make, or actually fabricate.
Like they've been fabricating fentanyl in Mexico.
There have been a few laboratories found in Mexico where they're actually making fentanyl in Mexico.
This is very common now.
But they learned their tradecraft and skill craft from people from China.
How can the Chinese government have these people moving in and out of the country and showing these things back and forth and not like, oh, we don't know anything about this?
Trendaragua, which is talked about a lot here in the U.S., these Venezuelan gangs, they're operating in central Mexico openly now.
There's power vacuums all over the country where all these cartel guys are getting hit and people are the age of the large organizations is probably coming to an end.
Sinaloa is the Sinala cartel doesn't exist anymore.
There's smaller factions basically in control, which is allowing things to come in.
Trendaragua are these Venezuelan gangs that are operating in a way where the Mexican government hasn't dealt with that.
It's more like localized gang shit, you know.
Kamora, like Italian mafia type dealings that they have.
Which is like old school Mexican cartels used to do.
So now they're having to de-evolve.
I mentioned this because I talked to some people who are actively working against that federally in Mexico.
And then all of a sudden we hear these mentions of Maduro, the president of Venezuela, being placed on that 50 million, I think they're offering for his head.
And he's basically now the head of the giant cartel, which is an interesting narrative that the U.S. is putting out there now.
I don't know how that works as far as a bounty on him, but he's worried.
He's mobilized militia forces all over the country.
There was three years ago or five years ago, a bunch of Americans were apparently hired by these private institutions, private groups, to go and try and liberate Venezuela, and they all got caught by fishermen on the coast.
There were some fishermen on the coast that were like, hey, what were these guys doing here fucking with a 50 cal on top of a pickup truck?
And I think they were grabbed and they were put on media and like, oh, these guys are all people.
I think one of them did security for a Trump event, so they put it all on Trump.
Trump organized this.
I don't know the whole of the details.
This is like a little bit out of my wheelhouse.
But what I've heard is that a lot of that money actually came from Cuban intelligence people who were just trying to orchestrate an embarrassing moment for the U.S. by paying all these mercenaries who are American to try and liberate Venezuela and just catching them.
Yeah, and they clearly have some sort of free movement between Venezuela and Mexico.
What's going on?
What is going on?
But I think we're headed for something.
Last time I was here, I said in five years, we're going to see some sort of direct military intervention in Mexico, which has already happened, I think, with the arrest of Lamayo Sambala.
I kind of called the whole terrorist designation thing.
I said I didn't think he was going to do it on his first term, but the second one.
And he skipped a term, and then we had some time, and then he came back with a force.
I'm an immigrant, Joe, and I've seen that side of policy in the U.S. and how it's affected the community and generally the people.
But on the other end, I've also experienced Biden and the open borders policy and the amounts of horrible shit that I saw on that border and people being a bunch of kids that went missing or kids that were like, what's going on with all these kids and why do they have armbands?
And all these migrants.
Human trafficking.
Yeah.
All these migrant camps being set up on the border.
The phenomenon that's going on that I don't see a lot of people talk about is that the fact that a lot of Americans who are into this moved to Mexico.
And in Mexico, it's harder to find some of these people.
So a lot of it, some in some of these expat community places, there are people hiding out who are pedals.
And they don't no longer have to figure out stuff in the U.S. So they're moving down there and they're doing some of that down there.
Trafficking of children, the sales of children, child theft, kidnappings are common in Mexico.
They're very common in Mexico.
And it's not something that you hear a lot about, but masses of people and children being moved up into the border have had some sort of organized effort with them to help that out.
If you're a cartel member and you're on the border and all of a sudden you see 14 kids that are all asleep, you're like, what the why are all these kids like asleep?
Oh, they're tired from the trip.
I mean, I have a kid.
I stop at a Starbucks and she wakes up, like, where are you getting?
I know that as an immigrant myself, I know that this administration, specifically in this part of its history and what's happening right now, is there's a lot of stress and fear.
I see the effects of it in different industries from agricultural to culture to just this general anxiety that is felt across the country by people of my color skin that look Mexican or are Mexican, you know.
But I also am not blind to or not stupid enough to see and compare it to the past administration and some of the shit that went on there.
That's the problem is that it's an over-correction.
The problem is when you have an open border and you do know that cartel members are just freely going across and you do have human trafficking and you want to stop it, then you want to get everybody out that came in during the last four years.
So now you have 20 million people you have to account for.
Most of them are just people that wanted a better life.
Most of them.
But they have mandates now and mandates get creepy because then people become numbers.
And if you say we got to get rid of X amount every day, then you just show up at Home Depot and you get some hardworking guy with a family who just wants to do some roofing jobs.
Like if someone's been here for 20 years, they've been working on a farm and they're good people and they've established a family here.
Let's figure out a pathway to amnesty.
And then there's the hard right pushback.
They're like, fuck you.
You got here illegally.
Get the fuck out.
It's like, those are jobs Americans could do.
It's like, I mean, well, first of all, my take on that is if you're using illegal labor at the very bottom line, what you're doing is not paying people what they should be paid.
Someone explained that to me, that he was having a conversation with this extremely wealthy guy who was upset at the crackdown on the border because they need illegal workers.
It's a part of their business model because you don't have to pay them any benefits.
You don't have to pay them whatever the- Yeah, exactly.
If you're poor, if you're poor, it's almost impossible.
I have good friends that have immigrated to the United States, and they have to prove that their job is something that can't be done by an American or that they're exceptional at their job.
And it's been wild seeing that and the effect it has had on just general on the on the Mexican side is fear and anger and even like more anti-American feelings, you know?
And also this new arrival of these Americans, because think about this.
And I have a friend that I sometimes help out in places like Tijuana, where we recent deportees show up in Tijuana, and there's a lot of them right now.
Imagine you live in the U.S. from when you're two years old all the way to your 30s.
I met a dude that, again, I think he was, since he was two, he was brought across.
And he found out that he found out that he didn't have any, he found out that he had any paperwork, I think, at 18 when he started doing some sort of process.
And they're like, wait, where's your birth certificate?
When people look back at this, you know, the United States leaving Afghanistan as it did guaranteed that it's going to be very hard for America to find friends internationally now, realistically.
However, it deals with Mexico in the next few years is going, it's going to define this nation.
Whatever's happening right now, whatever deals are being done, whatever this administration is pointing at is going to define us.
I mean, my kids are going to have to live with the results of this.
But the thing I point at is that within my same community, they try and point at people in politics as like, no, but he's part of the Democratic Party.
He's going to help us.
You know, whatever governor it is in whatever state.
How crazy is it that Biden deported 1.549 million while letting in 20?
Like, what do you think they were doing?
Was that a part of destabilization?
I know there was also efforts to move people to specific states so that you can get a larger number for the census, so you get more congressional seats.
This is a dark thing that people don't want to admit because they're a died-in-the-wool Democrat, but listen, it is.
And I asked because I'm trying to find logic between deporting the Biden administration doing that and then opening the door in that way.
For me, it's always been interesting how a lot of these migrant caravans have a story or a narrative in their head all the way from where they're coming from up into the U.S. So like Sean Ryan was here a while ago, and I think he mentioned that we actually went, I took him down to TJ to one of these migrant caravans that was right on the border.
And I told him, hey, Sean, you want to talk to some of these people?
Ah, sure.
And he got a kick out of the fact that in the middle of this camp, there was a giant Biden flag flying.
But that wasn't the funniest thing.
I'll see if I could send you the picture.
All of the guys that we were interviewing, this is still COVID mask era.
Some of them had Make America Great Again masks on.
I have no idea who gave them those, but somebody with a sense of humor probably did.
I have a picture of me and Sean Ryan with some of the people that we interviewed, and they have Make America Great again masks on.
But they were told by the organizers that they had a clear path to the U.S. And all they needed to do was Make a lot of noise on the border, make a lot of newsworthy events on the border, talk to all the press they could, and somebody there was keeping tabs, and then they could go.
Wow.
That was the mindset that a lot of them had, which is a weird one, you know?
And then some of them would talk to us about the fact that they would get aid from the U. Like from Americans would come down and give them their camps, their tents.
The destabilization is one, but just politically to get more congressional seats because of the way they use the census, which I think Trump is trying to change.
Is he changing that?
They said they weren't going to count illegals in the census anymore.
So Congress would have to agree with him on something like that.
Which I think politically there might be motivation to do that because you could game the system by an administration allowing not just mass immigration, but then the moving of all these immigrants to all these areas where you wanted to take over.
Well, that's part of the beauty of America, really.
The beauty of America is that it's a melting pot.
That's supposed to be what's cool about it.
But when it's sort of weaponized in this way, when people are using it for their political gain and bringing people in for political gain and then making a person like you go through crazy hoops and ladders and all this shit to try to get in here legally.
You're like, oh, you're discouraging legal immigration in favor of illegal immigration, which is really easy.
Well, in Mexico right now, there are things you can't say.
There's laws that prohibit you from being violent verbally against a political figure if she's a female and you'll have to go on TV and like read out like a whole thing apologizing for your insults.
Public humiliation basically is being legalized in Mexico and Mexico is going towards that side of things.
But I'm up here and I'm seeing some of the things up here as well.
I have this vision of the U.S. where it's like, cool.
This is a place where I'm safe to pursue whatever happiness I think exists.
I didn't find that happiness in my country where I'm from, where I came from, because this or this or this or that.
Why do I want to bring some of that here, I guess, would be one of the ways I think about it.
I don't want, hey, Texas is kind of boring.
Let's bring in fucking militarized cartel members to roll around the city and pick up kids and shit like that and train them into camps.
Everybody's super polite and also like, hey, you know, call the cops after, you know, whatever mentality that is.
In Mexico, airsoft guns are like on weird lists.
Like you can't buy a site for a gun.
If you want to buy a gun, you have to fly to Mexico City, which basically makes it prohibited to anybody that doesn't have any real means or money to get guns or training.
So it's basically you're not, you don't get the privilege to defend yourself in a country where you can't trust the cops.
90% of all murders are never solved.
And look at all these fucking roving gangs rolling around with fucking capabilities of taking down helicopters.
They're cool, but you can't have a .22 caliber pistol.
That's the mindset.
When I came up here, I'm like, oh, cool.
This is a place where some of that is not the case.
But then a bunch of gun laws passed in California while I was going through my process and people started showing up to the gun range that I would go to train with like weird California compliant guns that you have to like weld the magazine to a certain place and stuff like that.
And I was like, oh man, it's changing up here too.
When I got there, and again, I've lived in Kentucky for a bit, in California, and then there.
I've experienced great profiling and racism in California, which is pretty funny to say, but that's where I experienced the most of it.
I've experienced people opening their houses to me and like just being the best people on the planet.
I experienced that in Texas and Kentucky with some people who are just like cool as fuck.
I've experienced the best and the worst that this country has to offer, I think.
And I can see in it, like, I get it.
I get what America is.
Like, I, dude, I finished high school and then I went to work for a paramilitary institution somewhere in Mexico.
And then I came up here and I have seven employees now in a company.
I've spoken to members of Congress.
I've trained federal forces and people that I've read about in books on how to do things that I learned in this horrible country warfare that I had to go through.
There's no other place on the planet that would have provided me these opportunities for myself and for my daughter.
There's no other place in the world.
So like I definitely have fucking skin in the game when it comes to this country.
It is disheartening that with the way things are now, like we're it.
Like brown Mexican immigrants of any kind, legal or illegal, are it.
Yeah, that's the problem with these fucking raids.
It also makes the rest of us feel awful.
Like people that aren't scared of it, you feel awful about like what America stands for.
Like the idea that we would find it right to send some kid who was born here or born in Mexico, but came over here when he was two, can't speak Spanish at all.
Some kid in LA that just doesn't have paperwork and all of a sudden he's in Mexico.
I see the U.S. in people internationally see the U.S. declining.
I got to experience the U.S. in the 80s, crossing the border and going to San Diego and going to SeaWorld with my parents and shopping and seeing the portions of everything bigger in the supermarkets.
And then as an immigrant in the U.S. now, I got everything smaller.
And infrastructure is very dilapidated in certain parts of the country.
And it's not the U.S. of the 80s.
It's not the U.S. of the 90s.
It's different.
So yeah, I can see why people are screaming at the fact that, yeah, there's something has to be done.
We're losing it as a country.
But I think you're hitting on the nail on the head.
We went through a Biden administration that was all about who was in charge is the question I have.
But it's wild to think and then people question why things are the way they are and why people are struggling in different parts of this different parts of society in this country.
I came here to work and to make a better life for myself and for my kid.
And I somehow managed to be in a place where I have like employees and I have a company and I'm working.
And the same fight that is played on social media, stateside, is kind of like the same fight that is being sold to us as far as Mexico versus the United States.
We're not enemies.
We shouldn't be enemies.
We should be the best of friends.
There are thousands of Americans living in Mexico now.
There's protests going on for gentrification in Mexico City from people being locals being pushed off.
Go home, ringos written on the walls.
Meanwhile, there's ICE raids in LA and people being rolled up and being deported.
And that's happening all the while where people are trying, like Mexicans are sick of all these Americans living in all these cool parts of Mexico and gentrifying them, which is wild.
I mean, are we into mass American deportations next from Mexico?
Is that going to happen?
In the past, you can just cross the border as an American and they wouldn't ask you for shit.
Yeah, when I used to work in San Diego, and I used to stand up down there, and if I hung out after the shows, I'd meet a bunch of people that came to this show from Mexico.
We have everything we need to just fucking explode.
Resources, everything.
But that's the same reason why we're being targeted so much for destabilization there.
Wow.
There's no path forward, I think, to have a isolated United States with giant walls and guards on the walls and nobody crossing that wall and Mexico next to it.
The flow of armaments going down to Mexico is one issue.
The flow of drugs coming up from Mexico is another issue.
The organized crime elements in Mexico doing horrific things to the local populace and to each other when they fight each other is an issue.
But also the United States' historical foreign policy to Mexico and its responsibility for a lot of these things happening in Mexico is also key.
What should the United States do about its responsibility in the past and some of its foreign policies in Mexico that have led Mexico to be where it is right now as far as violence?
I don't know.
I don't think a full-on military attack like Afghanistan or Iraq would be the answer because we see where that goes.
It's not as easy as sending just drones down there and exploding a few dudes because we've also seen what that happens when you cut the head of one snake.
You just abducted the head of the Sina Loa cartel and brought him to Texas.
And all that did, it didn't quell cartel violence in Mexico.
It didn't end the Sinaloa cartel.
It just made a giant war in the state of Sinaloa and it divided up one cartel into two and probably made one of the biggest threats the United States national security as far as cartels go bigger and more influential.
That's what that did.
Wow.
And again, the path forward, I don't know.
Both countries are linked through blood, genetics, culture.
There's a dude online saying that Mexican food is better in the U.S. than Mexico.
We are going to need each other more than we think in the coming years.
And open warfare between both countries is not fucking insane.
It's not going to be, it's not going to lead to anything.
The United States doesn't have the manpower to stop the wave of migration that will come out of that country if you start fucking lobbying targeted strikes in certain parts of that country.
There's no way.
So if you want to talk about anti-like migration is your issue.
You're going the wrong way.
And also at what point do some of these criminal organizations, as I said, become freedom fighters?
Right.
And once they become freedom fighters, at what point do they start targeting Americans living down there?
I've been in rooms with people who were part of this conflict and they're asking the right people.
But some of them are verifying like, oh, we were just in Mexico and we spoke to the local officials there and they told us that they're doing this now.
And look at all those drugs that they just got.
They're doing their job now.
And I'm like, dude, I used to work for them.
And I could tell you that those boxes beneath those pills are probably empty and they're just there to produce a visual weight of it.
And also like that unit that did that seizure, they're on a payroll for this organization.
And also the governor of this place where this seizure happened, yeah, you just took her visa away because the husband is involved in fuel smuggling.
But there are people that are trying to figure it out in the government.
There are people that are asking the right questions.
I just, I don't know what they're doing.
I don't know what's going to happen with the information.
But a few things are clear.
Everything is on the table as far as military options in Mexico and beyond in South America right now.
There is an interest by the United States in some of that going on.
That's clear.
And What that's going to look like, is it already happening with the abduction and subsequent arrest of Elmaya Sambana on a plane in some pretty kind of weird circumstances?
Do the United States, is the United States already doing political counteroperations against the regime that is ruling over Mexico in some way, shape, or form?
I don't know.
There's a bunch of political exposés going on all over Mexico right now with a bunch of documents and members of their very austere political party having lavish lifestyles outside of the country and they get photographed and then that goes on the news and then the president of Mexico says the CIA probably is taking all those pictures as a counter operation to what they're doing.
So I think whatever's happening is it's already in motion.
My point is the cost of this is if it isn't done in a if it isn't done if it if it isn't done correctly or if it isn't done in a way where it's not taking into consideration the outcome or the fallout of something like abducting another giant head of a cartel down there or taking him out.
And I think the biggest target out there is the head of the new generation cartel.
I think that's if I if I could be a psychic right now and I say the U.S. is going to plan some sort of direct action operation, I think that's going to be aimed at them.
But if the Americans have a vision that they're going to go somewhere and everybody's going to be wearing cartel member vest on, I don't think they're ready to go to somewhere and they have a bunch of police officers with full uniforms or actually police officers there or members of the military that engage in a firefight with them and call backup from the military.
And then now you're involved in a Nash, in a, in a fight with the army down there.
Again, you hear these stories of these people, who's training them, who's supplying them, who's showing them how to use those rocket launchers that they're getting from the Ukraine.
You hear these stories and you're like, just like that dude standing up there, the CIA is involved in drug dealers.
Like, Ed, you're just talking out of your ass.
It's conspiracy theory shit.
Five years ago, I said terrorist designation and direct action in Mexico against a high-level cartel head.
And here we are.
Yeah.
And maybe I may be on that side of conspiracies, but I've been pretty spot on.