Cartel Corruption Explained by Mexican Crime Expert - Ed Calderon

didn't have a lot of choice you know somebody in their early 20s there's only a few choices one of them is going in to work for the cartels and the other one was going to work for the government now were you ever recruited did you ever get the opportunity to go work for the cartel or no i opted out and went for that that police career i always tell people that i'm a cautionary tale more than anything so what happens if you say no i just want to be straight what do they do to you are you all of a sudden ousted and not trusted you're ostracized there are basically small factions within a police group like that some of them work for one cartel some of them work for the other sometimes you're just working and you're actually involved in some sort of interest that is way beyond your pay grade and you don't even know about it meaning you don't know you're part of it you don't know you're part of it military police or cartel who has more power mexico doesn't have a single cartel it has many a new generation cartel one of the biggest and growing cartels out there sinaloa cartel which are rivals of them how has the cartel made money during colbid drugs of course you know human trafficking and each of these cartels will pay for participation in what they do to different groups you know you don't know who to trust so it's hopeless and it's a powerful word for you to say hopeless that's why i left that job if you go into somebody's pocket you're not climbing out my guest today for over a decade has worked in the fields of counter narcotics organized crime investigation and public safety in northern border region of mexico and he's got enough crazy stories to make a 12 series show or documentary on netflix we're just trying to get a couple of the stories out today from the one and only ed calderon and thank you for being a guest on thank you so much for the invitation so so ed how does one wake up in the morning and decide to do what you're doing on a daily basis uh being young and desperate in mexico uh during the economic downturn that's about it you know um there's i would tell i always tell people that i'm a cautionary tale more than anything um i was i was in medical school uh after 9 11 and the economy tanked all over the country specifically specifically on the uh on the border because of the uh border restrictions and uh i didn't have a lot of choice you know somebody in somebody in their early twenties uh there's there's only a few choices uh one of them is going in to work for the cartels and the other one was going to work uh for the government in this new experimental police unit that they wanted to uh kind of put it put forward so i um i opted out and went for that uh that police career now were you ever recruited did you ever get the opportunity to go work for the cartel or no that was the uh that's uh that's a process that uh happens when you get recruited into police forces uh when you're in the police when you when you uh when you sign up for this they do a background check they do an fbi background check they look into your financials they look at who your your who your brothers and sisters are all this type of stuff that process begins when you sign up for recruitment and then when you're inside the the academy you know every now and then they just start pulling people out of there uh people that they've the fbi background checks uh take a while so people that have some sort of history on the u.s side criminally that doesn't show up in mexican databases or people that they find some sort of relationship with uh cartel members that type of stuff so so so recruiting is you first go to become a work for the government and then the cartel recruits you away from the government to go work for them so some sometimes that's the case sometimes they send young people just off the bat uh apathetinales as they call them uh apathy now means uh somebody that's uh that's paying your way basically and that's common even to this day throughout a lot of police forces people being there showing up in a brand new jeep to the recruitment center which is pretty suspect you know um or uh or just being inside making their way through the whole academy process and when they're active they just start working for cartel interest from within police forces um you know a little bit of all that happened um some of the older guys working on would would offer you know hey you want to work for us and when you say what do you mean that's like us us like oh you know what that's uh that's interesting but uh i like being alive and i also just like i'm just here to work um that i'm talking about 2004 era that's a that's that's a that's a weird transitional time between all the old way that things were done in mexico and then the new uh you know drug war that was kicked off by felipe calderon uh so you you saw a massive purge in a lot of police forces including the one i was a part of uh with desperate master measures being implemented like uh consistently putting agents through polygraph exams um house visits surprise house visits to all ages involved and they would go into your bedroom and take a picture of your tv to see if it matches up the tv you had only last visit and you if you had a new one you would have to explain how much you've got to be kidding me oh this is this is they're smart for doing that though good for them if they're getting that detail it was uh it was a it was a plan of it was a controlling confidence plan that they had on the national level that uh didn't work for a simple reason uh the higher-ups didn't go through that uh control and and confidence plan that's why you started seeing high-level people um being arrested only recently that were part of all those uh efforts to kind of clean up police police forces it worked for a while and uh there's there's a there's a lot of research out there there's a lot of papers out there uh talking about some of the only drugs drug war successes on the on on behalf of the mexican government occurring in places like baja where i was really active in um and a lot of that had to do with the the uh the implementation of some of these things like uh police certification processes coming in from the u.s there's a there's a there's a international police certification process called kalia which is run by american police officers and we went through it and were certified by that uh that that program wasn't easy specifically for a police group in mexico to get through it um but they made a really good effort with us to try to keep us uh on the straight and narrow the problem in the end was that every six years mexico go through a case of uh self-inflicted amnesia we're not a two-party system in mexico there's a few more parties than that so uh felipe calderon um went out uh central central kind of left us came in and everything was kind of redone you know uh programs were canceled um things were deemed unconstitutional like having somebody go into your house and take pictures of your private life or being polygraphed and having a polygraph examination be the the means for which the government tells you you can't work there anymore that was deemed unconstitutional so guess what happened to all these people that were taken were purged out of some of these police forces during that that massive attempt to clean up the police forces in mexico they all came back well at least some of them those that didn't go to work for the cartels came back and you saw basically you know six years worth of trying to clean up a system that is that is deeply corrupted just go just go out the window and now all these people are coming back and um and recently you have a leftist president that basically just said we're just going to start from zero so more meaning the federal the national federal police is going to stop existing and all the guys that went uh into police work as a career path that doesn't mean anything anymore um you're gonna get paid exactly like the field soldier they're gonna be working uh next with and off you go right um all that all the things you did all the stuff you did is now discounted it doesn't matter you're kidding me so all the tenure everything you did you're going back to zero no matter what you've done let me ask you in all four when the one guy came up to you and says do you want to be part of us you want to be part of the team and he said no i just kind of want to do my business when he says us he's saying like cartel right he's talking about okay so now the question becomes i watched a movie i don't know nine years ago eight years ago where uh they're they're bad cops and one of the guys who's working with him is a good cop there's this opportunity for the bad cops to take money and they tell this guy to take the bad month take the money and this good cop turns it down and he says no i'm not going to take the money i don't remember the exact movie what it was so he turns it down but after turning it down all of a sudden everybody turned against him so what happens if you say no i just want to be straight what do they do to you are you all of a sudden ousted and not trusted you're you're ostracized from that by that whole imagine that yeah a group um now you have to realize that these are multi-generational type groups uh when i went in there i was part of uh was part of this the tenth group going through training and and then getting in inside of that line of work got it now mind you this is not a police academy like the us this is a uh this is a paramilitary type training uh plan they have going had going on with uh with gaffes gaffes are what the uh remember the the zetta cartel which were former mexican special forces guys well the people that are training us in that in that academy setting were mostly all gothic guys so they were all old school army sf guys and uh training standards and and then humanitarian type uh you know treatment of people was not a thing in training so i don't know if people out there have seen the the old videos of uh of guys running the line and getting ak-47s shot around them to simulate realism uh i went through all that which is completely [ __ ] that's that's how you make somebody blind and deaf right um it was it was a it was a very irregular type of training with a there was basically a very big push to just create bodies to toss at the problem and you get outside and you have people that are on there for a long time that are in charge and you could start seeing how each of there are basically small factions within a police group like that some of them work for one cartel some of them work for the other a few of them are there on a career path so they try to keep their nose clean on a straight and straight and narrow and it's it's it's uh you could you might not be involved in anything but if somebody two or three levels higher up is your actions are going to reflect his actions and his purpose i bet it it it's uh it's not as simple as just being approached and getting money sometimes you're just working and you're actually involved in some sort of interest that is way beyond your pay grade and or you don't even know about it meaning you don't know you're part of it you don't know you're part of it um when i got when i got inside there was there was there was a few factions that were pretty interesting to me as far as you know people that were there because they had some sort of sense of uh you know they wanted to change things um there was there was a there was a large uh group of young you know very active people that were into the training side of it that wanted to certify themselves professionalize themselves that they really saw the promise of doing something differently change for the better meaning change for the better making making the job title that we had matter again and not to be something that is as it is now completely vilified um among the people that were there for that uh there was a lieutenant colonel by the lane the name of a legendary figure in the drug wars that happened uh in in the border region um career military individual uh came out of the war college highly trained um i uh and and basically came in as leadership for us he had a zero tolerance policy you know as far as any sort of corruption or any sort of irregularity and uh the reason he was very successful in in in what he did is that he really put a lot of effort in recruitment uh he was the first uh to kind of push forward um internal investigation type things uh for the agents and and to build basically trust amongst the people working there is he still alive he is uh after many assassination attempts many um the last one took the use of his legs uh and he's been cur he's been uh actively pursuing the office of mayor of tijuana for the past two elections uh they're blocking him anyway and the powers that b and d1 are blocking him but he's uh he's very popular still with those people um he was i mean he's often quoted as one of the most successful uh directors of of of some of his counter-narcotic operations in mexico how old is he he's uh he's i think he's probably nearing his 60s now got it yeah he is you know uh he is uh he's exactly what the what the society needed at that point um there's there's a tendency internationally and in mexico to consider the problems that we have uh in in terms of a community community policing problem and or a national policing problem the truth of the matter is this policing matters and do not usually involve uh criminal groups knocking down helicopters out of the air um they don't have to they don't have to include transnational drug trafficking uh of a scale that hasn't been seen ever in our history and it usually doesn't involve having more people disappear uh in in a country and murdered in a country than in all of its history even including some of the wars um it's a it's an insane it's an insane you know concept to kind of grasp i'm looking at it right now controversial ex-soldier and police chief whose candidacy made headlines across mexico with 99 percent of ballots gonzalez was ahead by 152 000 compared to la zola's 124 000. ed who's who's stronger in in mexico military police or cartel who has more power the military is behind all power in mexico that's my belief as far as political power as far as the military-industrial complex and as far as the weaponry and who gets to have weapons and what police forces get armed and what police forces don't uh the military is a pretty powerful uh it's a pretty powerful powerful entity in mexico you could then more than cartel i'd i'd say i'd say they're they're they're uh in in in depending on what you mean as far as power you mean control all over the the region of the united uh of mexico i i guess i guess the part is there's uh uh does the cartel you know most movies when you watch them you see cops are bad cop so you don't see bad soldiers you see more bad cops than you see bad soldiers you know when you watch them is it is there is there where the cartel and el chapo type of a person there rafa quintero can call and say hey tell your people to kind of calm down and get out of here because they're making my life hard or else is there any relationship like that with cops and military i mean we just had the release of general general tim fuegos who was a high level uh operator of the past administration in mexico under under entry pena nieto and he was basically accused and recorded talking to cartel members about operations in central mexico uh a little bit of translate which was a offshoot of sino-law cartel that became a very deep rival of el chapo um so the the military has many cases of corruption um and you could see a shift in in in confidence as far as u.s uh u.s and and mexico military ties uh during the the philippe coddler administration they started shifting kind of all tip the spear operations over to uh the mexican marines uh the mexican marines were the ones that used to show up in the video in the uh and the el chapo raid um basically they shifted over all kind of efforts towards them because they saw the mexican military as compromised uh several instances have happened since then you know starting with the cetas debacle basically a whole mexican special forces unit going off and working for a cartel um so you see you saw a shift with that but now you've also seen high level arrest of marina members protecting sinaloa cartel guys or um two units of uh fully uniformed uh mexican marines uh taking part in abduction uh for ransom schemes uh so realistic i mean it's it's it's uh it's it's only a matter of time uh when need kind of gets into some of these uh some of these groups and and forces uh people to work for one side or the other that's that's the thing that people need to realize mexico doesn't have a single cartel it has many uh the new generation cartel one of the biggest and and biggest growing cartels out there uh sinaloa cartel which are rivals of them and each of these cartels will will pay for interest or pay for participation in what they do to different groups so you can go into a town where the state police works for one cartel the municipal police will see the other the army works for another and the marines work for another and the and the national guard will work for another so is it does anybody not work for somebody which is like the most hated is there anybody so i i mean it's at least compromised it's an interesting question but it brings me back to the whole you could be the cleanest guy out there you can be working with a group of people that are completely verified vetted backgrounds checked and you will have somebody above you in a directorial type who does not go through all that process so at its core i think there's something wrong with the political class um and there's something wrong with uh with putting forth uh such uh instruments of uh to try to filter out bad people in environments like that and not have the people above you kind of be uh pushed to the same standard space what's what's the cleanest one where the people at the top are kind of like the julian who ran for mayor what who is the cleanest most feared uncompromisable guy at the top that annoys the hell out of the cartel right now there's no such figure god right now there's a trigger in my mind uh you know at a time for a time it was uh you know what lieutenant colonel is all up there's a reason why he was tried was to assassinate so many times right and there's a reason why certain political class wants doesn't want him to see in in control of the richest drug route on the planet which is tijuana um it's it's it's uh it's a sad it's a sad thing for me to say as somebody from mexico that i don't see that i don't see a clear top guy that the cartels would be afraid of on the government side that makes you think if if there's nobody at the top and you know if everybody at the top is dirty are you also insinuating that pretty much anybody in mexico to be president you have to be dirty you have to be connected to the cartel or no you're saying there are some presidents that actually want to clean house i would say that even with the best intentions at the top somebody within the group or the cabinet will be corrupted we we saw this with martinez luna who was the head of felipe calderon's very you know stringent push towards cleaning up and and doing whatever he was trying to do which is specifically to go after the cartels um and even then you saw his top cop of mexico being arrested on the u.s side or connections to the sinaloa cartel that came out after el chapo's arrest um again it's like i remember this x-files episode where there was a guy that would smoke said trust no one to mulder you know that's exactly that's exactly it you know you you don't know who to trust and and uh you could be in the you could terrible place to be yeah you could be in the in the best office doing the best work being one of the highest paid uh agents uh doing that type of work in mexico and you're great and you're on a career path and all of a sudden um leadership changes and now you're you're not you know that all that goes away so it's hopeless uh for people doing that work like myself that did that work for 12 years that really and there's a lot of people like me out there um it's not just bad cops people always you know point out the bad ones and don't look at the at some other good ones that were they're out there still or some of the guys that really wanted to professionalize what they were doing yeah and it's a powerful award for you to say hopeless it is it is it is very i i didn't see any hope uh that's why i left that job uh after only a year before kind of thinking about not being able to leave that job because i was very specialized in what i did so i couldn't i couldn't see any sort of other form for me to maintain myself um but there there there comes a time even in any job and specifically that one when you saw all of the top people that you would trust that were you know they were on the right path as far as your uh your your life choices go and see them all basically being removed and new people be put in place that you recognize completely as former people that you were told yeah that's intense that's intense how much of the flipping is caused by fear how much of it's caused by money meaning i'm came in i wanted to be a marine i wanted to be an army guy i want to be an sf guy i want to go be a cop i want to go do i want to really make some change at what point do i hit a wall where kind of like what you hit in 2004 am i am i influenced to flip through fear if you don't do this we're gonna do this to your family or here's a hundred thousand dollars here's a jeep here's some money here's women how how do people flip at that point the people that i saw go into it it was always money first that's the entryway but there's a concept if you go into somebody's pocket you're not climbing out once you're paid the the the association is made if you would come to work for my police very true if you come to work for my police unit and uh and i is a car to an eye as a car and somebody cartel member wants to wants to buy your allegiance once he buys your allegiance uh it's known that you are working for somebody the reason why you get all these executions of cops during their off time or even even when they're working is because the rival cartel finds out you're working for somebody that is opposed to their interest so they they kill you uh that is that is kind of the entry way once you get inside inside somebody's pocket there's no going out and uh you know the uh lieutenant colonel is a hola quote uh the hand the hand that steals or robs will always hide itself but the one that spends will always give the other one away say that one more time the hand that steals or robs will always hide itself but the hand that suspends will always give the other one away so you would see people coming in uh and all of a sudden they had you know there's a there's a hummer h2 outside or or uh their house has three stories and as basically turning into a a skyscraper type of deal in the middle of a semi-shanty town-esque area some of these guys are coming in from from very poor communities and all of a sudden they have money and then you're like trying to compare wait where we you have the same paycheck how how do you have a three-story house you know or how do you have that uh new car um and it's they're always basically ticking time bombs i mean never last none of that lasts um and if you don't continue on doing the work then you get the uh the lead a colombian uh term yup and i was pablo yeah pablo uh still used in mexico uh plato plomo that's the choice if you get the if you get the plata you'll you'll still get the offer of the diploma yeah even if you get the silver which is the money yep you will you'll you'll still liable to get the lead um so that's that's the offer basically um and uh a lot i mean a lot of the guys that i used to work with a lot of them went went uh eventually went into one of the one of those uh one down one of those rabbit holes um be it through pressure uh be it through uh economic pressure which i people like people ask what what corrupts the most uh need need corrupts the most uh low paying wages in some places uh that where people work in this in this type of uh line of work in mexico uh social scorn um we would always have this joke that you you you're probably better off saying you're you're a male stripper than a cop when you're dating somebody in mexico less shame in in the and the male stripper part of it right than being a cop yeah so imagine hoarding somebody uh down there and uh are you married or are you married with kids or no uh no no not at night i used to be married not anymore got it did you ever use that yourself did you tell your uh your wife your ex-wife hey i'm a male stripper here in mexico usually it's a his work for the government and that's and then they slowly kind of figure it out and if they don't if they don't run when they figure it out you know that's a good sign but it was hard for people to stick around specifically when you were gone for months on end i bet i bet that uh it's a it's a pretty it's a it's a pretty it's a pretty bad lifestyle and what's the craziest thing you've seen i mean with your life what what i mean stuff that you can share obviously some of this stuff i understand it's stuff you can't share but what what did the life look like for the 12 years i think you said 12 years you were and what did it look like for the 12 years that you were in what were some of the ugliest things you saw on a day-to-day basis i i think at the moment you know what you you people people have moments in their life when they when they uh just figure out how crazy things might be in their in their uh in their time and space um i was involved in a uh i was called in for a situation that happened at the uh tijuana prison a major riot happening inside of tijuana prison and if people want to know what the tijuana prison is like or was like there was a movie called get the gringo by mel gibson which depicts a ver a fictional version of what that prison was like uh it used to have uh families of whole families living in it uh it used to have armed prisoners inside basically guarding their criminal nest it was it was a pretty bad place it was cleaned up uh and uh but still gangs inside of it controlled in certain aspects of it giant massive riot happens within it um some of the inmates uh disarm these the security forces on the inside raid armories uh start beheading people it was an insane scenario the prison itself is in the middle of a large population center in tijuana which is a big mistake but that's how mexico is you know we just uh we do we do things live as the ride is going as going on inside of the prison there's also a ride of the family members outside so it's uh explosive uh i am uh about to sit down for dinner after being moved from the operational group i was went with where we would react to things like this i was uh i was about to start a job as a bodyguard uh for a politician and all of a sudden we all of us are all of us get the uh that bad single call right so uh i get there i kind of walk around trying to figure out who's in charge and then i quickly realized there's nobody in charge there's uh the army's there the municipal police is there the director of the municipal police is on one end telling them they're using non-lethal rounds on the outside and on the other end there's uh people with a with the army people with military rifles shooting live rounds into the prison um so it's it's a pretty insane uh it's a pretty insane hectic situation um everything uh everything there just starts getting completely insane as soon as it goes dark um i'm i'm trying to figure out uh basically who to who to who to join up with and eventually amongst the crowd of people we start kind of recognizing each other uh and we all start kind of agglomerating into a single group to try and figure out how to best gain entry into the into the prison system uh into the prison uh courtyard to make entry and um you know amongst all these people of course there's uh lieutenant colonel lazola kind of taking control of everything it was probably one of the uh scariest nightmarish places that i've ever seen in my life uh from what was going on outside seeing all those mothers cry for their their sons and their daughters inside of that prison uh to then seeing some of the uh the wives and and daughters and sons of some of the border guards that were killed on the inside uh waiting waiting to to see if their loved ones were coming out or not um cs gas gunfire molotov cocktails um bottles of uh ammonia uh ammonia and chlorine being thrown at us from the inside basically chemical small chemical grenades um it was it was a it was a horrific horrific night that you know still kind of kind of uh get uh i remember it every now and then how old were you at the time when that was happening what year was that i think i was probably in my i probably reached 30 at this point i can't remember exactly what year it was but i was in my 30s um there's videos of it on youtube uh this is pretty horrific horrific night um there's videos of the event and on youtube from the two on a jail yeah there's videos out of the event um the uh when you when you when you when you uh when you remember things like that you know you you kind of sometimes uh certain details kind of bring that memory back i was in portland uh a few months ago during day 101 of the riots in portland and i was standing amongst a group of antifa members kind of observing what they were doing and a snack cart rolled through the uh the grouping handing out red bulls and water and uh then the uh state police threw a cs gas canister towards our way and i was i was standing there and everybody was running away and the cs canister was five percent cs gas so it basically made your eyes watery and your nose kind of itchy and uh i saw the amount of chaos that was happening in this this very beautiful community of the usi and then i saw and i remembered what i went through on the mexican side and kind of trying to figure out how to figure out how uh how these both of these moments in my life kind of related um i don't know it's a it's a it's a weird it's a weird kind of space to be in uh right now seeing the us as far as what it's going through and how there's act there's there's true strife in other parts of the world and that's true you know it's crazy you're saying that you know i i i left iran my family left iran to bring us here for a better life and you left mexico to come over here for a better life what do you see with what's taking place here in u.s with the madness especially this last year with everything going on with election covet you know uh portland chicago la everything that's going on here what are your thoughts with what's happening to america well um you know uh i get paid by people companies and the government every now and then hires me to show them how to work in in environments that are rife with uh lawlessness strife a place where you have to keep you take responsibility for your own security that's that's my thing right i do classes on austere medical management to how to not get into abduction scenarios and you know what to carry and when you travel that type of thing so when i go to places like portland kentucky atlanta when there was a ride i was in atlanta when the riots kicked off as well i'm there to observe and record and see if i can come up with some sort of solution for the for people moving in environments like that one thing that surprises me is that i was running away from things like that and all of a sudden i find myself in a place where these things are kind of slowly kind of producing themselves and manifesting themselves things like cancel the police or you know disband the police or whatever and and you know you're looking at that and seeing places like la where people would just walk in with a shopping bag and just fill their bags up and leave seeing certain counties up in portland that have no police at all there's i mean something happens and then some of those environments are no police come seeing how that's what people want to push towards when i come from a place where you know they'll see the lulla carts they'll beat the military in kuliakan you know you want to talk about canceling the police that's right um it's it's it's amazing to me and it's uh it's also amazing again being an immigrant uh i mean you're from iran uh you can you can you can kind of share the same point of view uh how you arrive to a place where things are different in good ways and in bad ways i'm not saying everything's great uh but the good ways it is uh that you see people complaining about some of those good ways because that's where they grew up with that's what they oh it's been there um you know every by now and then i have to knock a knock a few americans in the mouth and tell them you bathe every day in drinkable water and you flush a toilet with potable water so maybe not having romaine lettuce in the uh in the uh you know in the market and complaining to the manager about it might not might not be the you know best thing to do with your energy um yeah uh speaking to other immigrants as myself to this country uh i i met a very old school in 60 probably in the 60s just became an american vietnamese man very conservative in his views uh his sons are not so much the same way uh it was asking me about my political views and i told them you know i just want the the freedom to i just want the opportunities which i already have which i came to this country without anything i've been working my you know fingers to the bone and and and traveling just trying to make a life for myself and i've had nothing given to me and i've had all the opportunities that i that i that i could have wanted right so if somebody like me can do it you know it shouldn't be any it shouldn't be there shouldn't be a problem with the there shouldn't be a problem with the dream if somebody like me can get it and uh on his side yeah that's right you know but everybody wants some everybody wants a you know handout i i don't want to say that word but it's uh it's fascinating uh seeing a culture be outraged by things like the uh black lives matter movement talking about uh slavery's history in this country when there's actual active slavery in this country right now and uh it's uh it's mexicans working in fields paying off their their uh people smugglers um to be in this country um and uh so if i if i have to pay the people that wants this country and to work in a field somewhere i'm i'm a slave there's actual slavery in this country right now that people don't talk about um when cobit was on you know you know who the uh who the uh essential workers were people picking some of that produce it's an interesting it's interesting thing to think about and uh some of these people have to pay their ability to stay in the country and the ability for their families to cross that border the coyotes and criminal groups so you know things to think about perspectives big time that's big time perspective what you just said right there you know makes you really think on uh what's uh what's really going on over here you know you were talking about earlier i looked at the data between the mayor that won a mayor that lost julian he had 124 the one who won had 155 000 votes how much of voter fraud happens in mexico do they trust voting in mexico how bad is it in mexico it's it's amazing to say but voting is pretty legit in mexico as it is uh everybody has a federal voting card um with a clear picture id they're pretty good at keeping track of that the stuff that we don't want to do in america they're doing in mexico yeah and and the major there we don't have an electoral college uh but what we do have is this is a weird political system with new parties coming into play all the time a lot allegiances between these parties each uh go around so you know it's it's it's a it's a pretty it's a pretty interesting game of musical game of chairs uh going on what you see mostly though is money money and interest in places like tijuana so tijuana has a large uh public transport union for example tijuana is if uh if if a uh ten-year-old would would write down uh his image of a city with a crayon on a uh on a white page as he was going down a cobble street road that's what tijuana is you know it's a mess of a city you know urban planning came in at the middle part of it you know there's taxi taxi system that is not doesn't exist anywhere in the world it's it's just it's a mess of a place but money is eventually is in the end what runs it uh interesting to see in a in a coveted era you can go to tijuana right now and you'll see a bunch of apartments uh built being built up uh into the skyline now the tijuana is growing upwards now so it's it's a it's a sign of how it's growing economically which wouldn't make sense for a post covered uh era or a cobot era type economy i don't think i've ever seen a high rise and i've been to tijuana so many times i've never once seen high rise if you go down there now you'll you'll you'll be pretty surprised by the wow buildings got going up now interesting and and you would say well why is that you know and i don't want to be one that talks about uh conspiracies but my whole thing is that big the only reason why money hasn't stopped pumping into the into a place like tijuana even during cobit is because there's interest in tijuana that are irregular and some of these irregular interests usually pump their money through legal means to clean it up how has the cartel made money during kobit drugs what drugs same drugs or any other kind of drugs right now marijuana legalization in californ in places like california and denver uh pushed the cartels into looking for options uh one of the options they found is that the heroin market was not really kind of covered by some of these cartels although heroin has been grown in mexico for years it was just not really specifically a cash crop for them one they would focus on mainly um so legalization of marijuana in places like california and places like down colorado push some of these criminal groups and to start investing in heroin production i'm talking you know probably a decade back uh they produced a very low quality heroin probably something to do with the soil richness and having some of these places consistently planted with marijuana for years uh and uh they figured out that you could give it a kick by uh adding fentanyl garfield or carpenter in in into a product so that's uh that they figured that out during the crackdown on legal opiate prescriptions in the us so it was a perfect uh time and place for their product to come into the u.s and fill that void that was left behind the challenge with heroin as a product is your customer doesn't survive you know it's even even a drug dealer knows that you have you you don't want your clients to be dying or else you don't have repeat customers and heroin is not good for a drug dealer who wants to continuously make money at least weed you go smoke and you come back some of the other ones you don't kill yourself heroin is as deadly as it can be are some of them getting into the pills nowadays or no are they doing pills uh heroin uh methamphetamine of equality and purity that sure is is industrial that's that's their thing uh cocaine coming in from south america through mexican cartel hands is still a thing uh for people that wondering uh but i think the move right now for for a lot of these groups is going into a bogus uh or fake pain medication which is just basically hair uh basically a fentanyl carfentanil um being pumped into the uh looking for heroin west side yeah uh you know in pill form uh there's recently been a few large busts in mexico related to the new generation cartel where they were uh they found a bunch of uh industrial new pill presses to to fabricate pills and this has have been happening for a while now but there's they're putting more effort into that now i i had hector uhrezzan recently and he's the one from the show i think the last narc that came out i think on amazon i don't know if you're familiar with hector and him and i were having a conversation together a few weeks ago and we talked about uh rafa quintero who rafa came out and you know there's an old interview of rafa how confident he is he's got the swagger good look and i'm sure you've seen that video because it's been in many different music videos and then you see the new one that's saying i'm not was powerful i don't have any money i'm poor people are taking care of me and there's a lot of different uh uh you know uh uh not necessarily conspiracy stories where some say this guy is so powerful that he just he's playing weak and some are saying no he's actually very poor what do you know uh about the power and the influence of rafa caro quintero um he's he's active um there's no doubts about it he's working in in sonora uh with the uh with the family members basically he uh there are family members of him already running things in the region and he moved in there and and uh he's currently kind of it's in the know that he's taking control of that organization for or for the people that were actually still there uh rafael carlo quintero has been in the game since it started um he's one of two people that have originally you know started some of this still there um interesting to see that he is at the top of the list for uh for u.s interests as far as uh drug kingpins um in mexico when it's widely known by most mexicans that the head of the sinaloa cartel el mayo zambada is probably you know the oldest most active and most in control individuals in all of mexico right now when it comes to some of these uh activities but somehow he's not he's not at the top of the list he's the quintessential uh narco you know swagger the way he would dress all the expenses he would go through the ranches all that stuff that's where a lot of that culture comes from that uh that uh prototype of a individual that's that's where a lot of it comes from is he a feared guy or is he a respected guy or is he both he's both he's both uh he's a he's a he's a he's a folk hero uh just like el chapo you know just like el mayo zambada just like uh all the all of these all of these names out there they're in their communities and in the popular culture they're folk heroes um interesting to see things like netflix uh building shows around some of these people how they you know inadvertently have made a whole generation of people um know the names know them and hum and humanized who they are and what they do and you've got you have a lot of uh a lot of kids that are that were my age when i was coming up seeing the validity of going into that type of life maybe of uh wanting to set a name for yourself in that way um it's fascinating how they've normalized it in in a way uh they've normalized the the culture the lingo the the who's who uh and kind of this is this is just uh this is just this just how things are you know i mean in a way the show is educating people about the business model it's educating you and turning them in a hero you're almost rooting for the bad guy it's a weird thing that happens when you're watching these things you know even when you were watching pablo steve murphy is a good friend of mine the dea agent and javier pena we've had steve was just here i think few days ago he was here with us last week and we did an interview with him a couple of years ago who killed pablo escobar and they got a few million views and they did the whole arc on him and one of the things he didn't like about the show narcos is the fact that you you like them you're like they showed them in a positive way where you you're kind of like you know this pablo guy's a genius that pablo guy's a visionary you kind of you know it inspired a lot of kids to say i want to be like and when i grow up type of thing maybe in a different space but but going back to a uh uh rafa quintero or a uh some of these other guys that are out there right now you know what what needs to happen for this to come to an end meaning who wants it to stop who doesn't want it to stop because there's different motives and and which of these two is more powerful the ones that want to stop versus the ones that don't want it to stop who has more power well i i could start with uh two of the biggest uh two two maybe three of the biggest products uh that the that the mexican cartels make their money off of uh you know drugs of course but another one that people don't talk about a lot is people smuggling or you know human trafficking they make a lot of money off human trafficking and taxing people even after they have gone across the border and utilizing some of these people as endangered servants from sex trafficking which is a common thing to running local drug markets in mexico people don't kind of figure that part of the equation now it's not just cartels moving drugs into the u.s they also run local drug markets and make them a lot of money so that is another issue um and then realize that all of these uh substances um uh and and the and the and the fellow uh businesses that they run around trafficking drugs across the border like people smuggling uh like a contraband uh contrabanding and putting money into businesses that are necessarily legal but now they have the legal illegal money going to legal money all of that is fueled by a large country like china what i mean by this is that there's no way that drugs can sell heroin lace fentanyl uh fentanyl laced with heroin to the states without the ability to procure and fabricate fentanyl and all that comes from china uh all of it comes from uh from china and there's no way they can get anything out of china without chinese state knowing about it i mean that's this is this is it's not a chinese triads working with the cartels uh taking barrels of it uh of a fentanyl into into mexico or meth precursors that's not how it works that's not how anything works in china um so you you clearly see a big influence in regards to fabrication uh in regards to precursors and in regards to things like fentanyl being still available for groups that were on the pacific side of the of the mexican continent during covid in control of ports fentanyl was still available to them even during covet lockdown so i that's something that people should kind of look into but why is it why was that a thing uh so then you see this component of china probably being involved in in a way fostering some of some of some of these groups in in their production now that's not that's not conspiracy there's a lot of uh studies and and and a lot of people have gone to china to see where some of these chemicals are produced um and it's what's the motive it can't just be money what's the bigger motive it can't just be money uh if i mean i think it's a regional destabilization is what i think the motive might be another motive might be the fact that mexico has a lot of resources mexico might be the next uh africa for the chinese for the chinese interest as far as their expansionism they want they want some of the resources in mexico so it's not uh out of the out of the realm of possibilities to say that that's one of the reasons why you see and you've already seen things like illegal iron ore mined by chinese companies in mexico that's happened right so it's not out of the realm of possibility to say that they have their eyes on mexico as a as as as a means of expansion now is is the difference between mexico and africa i can see africa i can see why a lot of people target africa and and but mexico is there any motive from china mexico because it's bordering the u.s border and yes that i mean i'd say yes i mean there's there's there was a clear void made by the us in mexico at the start of the trump administration um trump announced a series of bringing jobs back to the u.s and a lot of u.s plans moved their operations out of mexico and back to the us this was done in with a lot of political jargon behind it by trump to kind of you know make america great again and america first type thing uh but in kind of in a way i think people thought it was his way of punishing mexico for you know being you know as uh as permissive as they as they were with their borders and allowing people to move through the border or something but then you you kind of see this whole all of the void left by those u.s companies was filled by chinese companies uh most of the most of most of the most of those interests that were left behind by the us and mexico were immediately filled up by chinese interest and you see a clear influence in in things uh as simple as going into an open air market in mexico city and seeing a bunch of chinese-made products all over the place uh even bootleg stuff that shouldn't uh shouldn't be legally allowed to be sold but it's sold in informal commerce all over mexico it's a pretty big business partner for them um so it's interesting to see how they're they're influencing things at a you know economic level on on that side industrial side and also there's no other place where some of these uh these cartels can get some of the precursors they're using for fabrication now is china doing it because china also wants mexico to not get very organized and under control do they want the havoc to continue because the more havoc the more they can get involved is that what you would say or do they want to see it being a little bit more stable than it is today i mean it should be clear that mexico has enough resources as a country to be a first world country it has everything it needs uh but for some reason this destabilization has been going on at a political level in mexico for years and it's not just from russia or china it's also been the us has been complicit in some of these uh some of these things that happened in in mexico's history um it's it's it's it's interesting to see a place like mexico uh you know there's a saying in mexi in mexico uh mexico legos uh mexico far from heaven but close to the united states um it it it's a uh it it talks about uh uh the the symbiotic relationship that that both of these countries have um there is a clear there is a clear uh interest uh there are clear us interests in mexico um it uh it it is in and it is in the us's best interest to keep mexico stable um so and it's also yeah and economic wise it's in its best interest to keep its second largest consumer of american products happy which is mexico again which is interesting to kind of say um so you would have to then think about who would be against all that well your biggest global rival right now is china um so it's interesting to see mexico being a quasi-vietnam type arena in the future for for for what could happen between these two large uh superpowers basically having a vested interest in this uh in this country we call mexico it's going to be very very interesting how how much have things changed you said something he said you can be working as a cop in mexico and then all of a sudden in tijuana everything's going good because your boss is good and then all of a sudden things change and you're going back from beginning again because now you don't know what their lineage is to which cartel who their loyalty is and you got to kind of adjust so you can't really trust anybody how much do things change for the cartel in mexico and the people of mexico when there's an administration of trump versus a biden how big of a change is it going to be for mexico under biden administration well i i can tell you this the the peso has been the peso has been pretty stable with trump in in in power on the u.s side and i think that has a lot to do with his relationship with uh with andres manuel lopez obrador who's a leftist which is pretty interesting that they had a good relationship right and he's a leftist almost like a socialist leftist right yeah yeah he's like a bernie sanders of mexico yeah he's a very much uh pro-open pro maduro pro chavista he uh there's a there's a they just put a statue of el chegevara and fidel castro in a park in mexico in mexico city which i mean historically it makes sense they met there and that's where they planned the revolution but uh it's interesting seeing politics going that way for people that know you know politically the capital of mexico is our california it's very mexico city is very to the left and it's what's pulling interest right now you usually see the conservative side of mexico uh to the north in places like baja or monterey that's where or guanajuato traditionally was very conservative as well but now you're seeing this trend of populism going into the left side of the political spectrum people obviously just sick of a drug war that start was started by the conservatives was fostered then by some of the central uh leftist guys and then now they the left has taken it and just turned it into uh into a amnesty type uh relationship with cartels and and talking about hugs not gunshots as a um as a counter cartel effort uh in policy you know um how how is uh how is politically how is a michoacan or jalisco how different are they are they conservative are they more liberal are they in the middle where are they at most of mexico is a catholic so very conservative uh but uh you know with people are just sick right they're sick of how things are so you see somebody at the extreme of the political spectrum like uh andres manuel lopez obrador who was like completely outside of anything anybody would have voted for uh six years seven eight years ago um then you that's the desperation that that's they bet on him basically and he won by a long stretch longest stretch uh that anybody's ever wanted uh in a while uh but it's been our two of our most horrific years as far as violence goes in mexico um you can see the covenant epidemic uh handling by this administration has been pretty pretty dire what's going to happen with biden what's how's biden going to influence now you just said mexico peso states stable it's pretty solid you know he was even able to make it work with the president of mexico but what's going to happen with biden well last time we had uh last time we had obama you saw debacles like the uh fast and the furious which again is people say it was inherited by the past administration but it was very fostered by that administration uh during the obama administration the economy was in and out uh down in mexico uh and we saw an influx of immigrants coming in from all over going through the country and shifting things in a lot of ways um the whole and i witnessed some of this uh the whole children just arriving uh by the bus on the on the border um that was pretty you know interesting and surreal but main thing is that you saw the clear proliferation and growth of a single cartel in mexico was a sinaloa cartel and you saw a lot of weapons handed by the americans let let walked across the uh the u.s border um and and nobody was informed on the mexican side of these guns all of a sudden showing up in places like the places where i worked where all of a sudden you were seeing cartel guys carrying around 50 cows or fn57 pistols that go through soft body armor it was it was debilitatingly you know humiliating for a lot of mexicans witnessing that type of uh policy being implemented to a neighbor right you that i think uh that started fostering what we're still kind of going through as far as anti-americanism in mexico um and uh i don't know i don't know what it's going to look like with an abide in a binding era i know i know that uh permissive drug policies on the u.s side usually mean growth for cartels on the on the mexican side so you know places like oregon that just legalize everything that's right it's basically going to be a giant a giant boo economic boost for the cartel that runs drugs into that area because now they have a bigger market you know so every time you see a shift into permissive and a permissive environment in places like uh us you'll see a shift and or growth uh california legalizes pot well cartels move people of theirs into california to grow pot illegally in public lands and then you see them go into the legal market as well in certain ways and they still uh pump in illegal weed from the from mexico into the u.s mix it with some of the the the california stuff and sell it so and also they've freed up their fields on the mexican side so they can grow hair so you know again it's it's a weird uh it's a weird uh kind of back and forth uh full of full legalization i don't think it's going to work for for for for cutting some of these problems in places like mexico and mexico is on the verge of legalizing weed is that a good thing or a bad thing for the cartel if there's no way you can have a giant regrow in mexico without paying off the cartel for protection although they'll just run in there and uh and uh steal your plants okay so let's believe that they have some sort of involvement already in the growth taxation and protection of the sense that makes a lot of sense because you got to go through them is it a similar model to the italian mob in new york and in philadelphia and how they ran it where we offer you protection you give us 20 of whatever profits you make if you lie we take you out is it a similar model like that or a little bit more vicious because at least one of the things about the italian mob was if you respected them they respected you you know they didn't bother you that certain code they live by or would you say the cartel is a lot more vicious than the italian mob they're a lot more vicious they're a lot more overt uh they are not afraid of the government so in in some of these ways they might differ but what usually happens is they call it cobra de piso or basically paying for the floor it's a taxation thing and that's another big money uh influx into cartels all over mexico paid for protection or extortion so you get basically you'll set up a grow field somewhere down there because this may or may not be the story of somebody that i already talked to about it because they they set up a crow down there and they were surprised by this they set up a grow somewhere where it's very beautiful and that's where you would want to grow something like this and they were immediately approached by somebody who was a lawyer representing some sort of interest and basically selling on the fact that if you want to grow anything here you're going to have to pay a tax and we are going to have people come in to evaluate what that tax is going to be so you say oh you mean your government tax no no visa all right uh the thing hap that it gets complicated when this happens you get comp it gets complicated when the cartel ruling that region gets into a fight with another cartel might want to rule that region so if i'm coming into your territory all the people that are paying you for protection i'm gonna burn their stuff i'm gonna harass them i'm going to steal their pot fields and that's going to lead into a wired conflict which again it's another thing that's fueling conflict out there there you go ongoing it's non-stop non-stop yeah i want to show you video here and i want to get your reaction because i learn a lot about you know the military cops cartel who's got more power there's a video of el chapo's son getting arrested you've seen this before when he's coming in a woman comes out but i want to get your reaction from it and just kind of see what you're uh saying about this when you see this uh uh let me pull this up here we go okay so that's a that's a federal uh police unit uh from mexico uh they're doing uh they're doing a recording on their camera helmet cams and that video feed is actually going live into mexico somewhere that usually runs some of these operations remotely as well that is not the people that you would take to arrest a high value target like el chapo's son that is not who you would take you're saying that is not who you would take but why are they there because they completely found this guy by surprise and they are just basically on a patrol they decide to raid this house that apparently had people armed in there and they found this this high value target in the form of el chapo's son you can see them behind you can see him hand hand something to a man behind him in a bit yeah the man behind him right there yep he hands something what he hands off is a gun got it probably a gun that he hands out behind which is again if somebody has a gun on him he's going to get shot you see all the rifles they're carrying yep yep no optics on them yeah these guys are patrol guys they're not the guys that you would send for an operation like this whitman they don't have suppressors on their guns they don't have any optics so they're they're not a top-tier group that you would send after somebody like that but how come they're not afraid how come they're not being uh you know uh fearful they're not afraid they seem pretty confident they're pushing around you know they're not uh uh if it was me there everybody would be zip tied on the ground but they're taking very special precautions to not treat anybody badly they're very very specific precautions to not hurt anybody and that is all indications of fear and they know exactly what they're in for if anybody finds out what they're doing and of course everybody found out what they were doing that's why they had the whole of sinaloa cartel surround the city to rescue him so what happened after this what happened after this while we're watching this you weren't you would you would never allow somebody like that to have a phone and keep uh calling somebody on the phone got it right so from your perspective it shows that they're so respectful of them that they're letting them make a phone call uh versus you and your division you would you would have him on the ground and his hands would be handcuffed and tied up anybody that went through the training that i had uh and a lot of the training was from the us source would have everybody on the ground and we would have a very superior force there if we were going after somebody like that uh it's interesting to see that they they took all these precautions and all this uh they let them have all this leeway and that is because they knew exactly what they were in for uh when it comes to having somebody of that high nature that you just found you're kind of handed off that means that it's complete surprise so there's there was no planning there was no operation to get them it was pure luck that they found this individual there um they uh they get orders to send them to a secure location in in a federal building in sinaloa and culiacan the capital and uh that's when the hold of the sinaloa cartel criminal organization arms up every single male member of their organization in the region and they start driving and pumping in from all sorts of places far and wide a massive congregation of armed men and uh armored vehicles uh 50 cows 50 caliber you know support technicals basically as they call them uh tied to back of trucks anti-aircraft capabilities active across the city to avoid any sort of uh you know incursion by military forces via helicopter to try and extract um el chapo sun and uh they surrounded the barracks where the family members of the military would stay in the state basically taking them hostages and there's a bunch of videos out there i posted up some on my instagram account when it happened of the cartels basically surrounding military forces and then having them shake hands in agreement that they were not going to move on anybody you saw this a massive event and they let them go and the the president came out and said they let him go to avoid further bloodshed uh but most of the people involved in that that i talked to said that they let him go because they're they let they got the order from the people there to let them go right when you say they got the order from the people to let them go who are the people to let them go government or el chapo's people the government people there didn't want did not want to give up their lives for got it individuals who who's more powerful el chapo's family or rafa quintero i think uh right now it's a regional thing some of them control different regions some of them control different drug routes uh i'd say the senate law cartel as a whole uh el chapo's kids and el mayo somebody's faction um as a whole that they they are still the dominant cartel force uh all across the border and in northern mexico i'd say if for a rival you have to look at new generation cartel run by a former mexican police officer named messio segura cervantes um that he he is poised he's poised to be the uh he's poised to be the next the next the you know the top guy and a former mexican police officer former mexican police officer was in and out of the system on the on the u.s side wow for uh trafficking same fear and respect the guy like rafa or uh he and the messiah has a way more of a high profile as far as fear he's respected and feared um he's a yes he has a he has a he has an expansionistic kind of approach to his uh the way that his cartels are moving in the country interesting more militaristic basically he's had the training i mean he's got all the training to be able to use some of that training he not only has the training but he also is very widely known in mexico as a as an importer of talent uh there's been testing fields for things like drone bombs and mortar uh improvised mortar explosive systems that you would see in places you would see in in use by the ira during the troubles uh so he's obviously bringing in people from probably colombian farc colombian park people that are aware of guerrilla taxes and warfare to um i don't know probably i would i would i wouldn't be surprised if i'd see some people from the former ira members probably assisting in or adding into the knowledge base so you're seeing that you're seeing rumors of the military type of training camps run by former uh us uh sf guys uh which is you know i've never been able to confirm any of it but there's rumors of americans uh basically working down there and training wow um you see elements of that and how they carry their gear how they set up rifles and stuff like that like i've seen a few things that i didn't share with some of my counterparts on the u.s side and they're like surprised by the level of detail that that they have you know um he has a very big push to recruit former military former police into his forces so he's a visionary type of guy he's got a vision he has a vision um i think he's poised to be the next uh the new generation cartel is poised to be the next dominant cartel in mexico is there a possibility of one of these guys eventually being the president of mexico that's not possible like you know how pablo wanted to be president is there one of these guys that wants to say what pablo couldn't do i'm going to end up doing i i think they have the possibility to put somebody in the presidency that has that's completely compromised yes but not not themselves like this person you're talking about not him he couldn't pull it off so one of the main arguments against naming cartels in mexico a terrorist organization is the inability of people to explain what their political motivations are so that's kind of a classic element that you have to add into a terrorist organization um cartels don't seemingly have political inclinations and or motives but political killings are rampant all over mexico so it's clear that some of these criminal groups do want somebody to be elected it's a lot of it mainly money freedom power and that's it is that kind of just their play that's the vision let me see how much money i can collect or is there something bigger than money most of these guys most of the guys that make it a long time el chapo had a lot of this and el chapo wasn't wasn't the guy that the us government kind of painted him out to be you know the el chapo guzman was painted out to be the head of the sinaloa cartel organization by the us government and he was not he was probably number two or number three in the uh in the big scale of things and he was uh he wasn't the man you know he wasn't that he wasn't the head guy it's always been a maya zambada el chapo's basically compadre um but you know again it's it's a weird kind of thing to see how he's not uh he's put in that uh in that realm is that a known thing is that a known think amongst the people it's a known thing amongst people it's it's a thing that's been coming out more and more after uh el mayo zambada's son wrote a book called that is out there highly recommend you you check that book out he talks a little bit about this how his uh how how he kind of it was it's weird how they focused on justin chapel as kind of a focal point and it probably has a lot to do with how he embarrassed mexican government uh by escaping from prison so many times and exposing the corruption within it um it's it's it it's he was uh he was a bigger than life individual um i think you're seeing a shift now and you see shadowy ghost figures like uh and messio saguera he's the different he's a different character rarely appears in pictures i mean there's only a few pictures of him out there um he doesn't he doesn't do interviews he doesn't go on he's not one of those guys so he kind of like mails into the background so it's a he's a different different uh guy now you know mayor lansky type of guy is are you familiar with meyer lansky meyer lansky was the the one of the four uh mobsters with uh ben siegel with lucky luciano with frank costello and meyer lansky was the guy that ran cuba and eventually he was ousted because he had a nice hotel business he was known for being a billionaire rich can he's like i'm just a regular guy but he didn't want any attention it was very quiet but he was very he didn't like the camera he didn't want any of the camera but people knew he had a lot of power yeah he's a he's a again mexico it's its own you know problem the reason why the us doesn't want to designate these uh groups as terrorist organizations has more to do with immigration than it has to do with actual uh is anything they can come your asylum is that kind of what you're thinking like make that make sense that totally makes sense and but they they fit every single you know they take every box if you kind of look at them uh isis videos circulated on social media as a as a weapon that doesn't come from the middle east that comes from narcoblog that comes from cartel torture videos being circulated before isis was a thing online and then them seeing the power and the value of exporting or transmitting a horrible event that happened somewhere in the woods and and and michoacan and exporting that to their enemies and also just to the general public um it's a that's a terrorist tactic and and and and you know they they don't seem to be be wanted to they you don't see the effort to to to call them what they are and ed how are you how are you able to talk about this stuff are you safe is anybody coming after you i mean is does anyone mind you educating the world on this stuff because you're getting you're getting on many different platforms you're telling you're revealing a lot of different things are they happy with you i'm not the only one talking about these things uh uh there's people like anna velocious the one that wrote that book uh that wrote that book the traitor the traitor uh there's that who is a legit uh she's she's legit as they come you know she's uh and you want to if you want to talk about somebody revealing truths that are dangerous i i'd worry about her more but um i am coming from this perspective of somebody that just worked in that environment and uh has been then put into the field of kind of observing to then teach about this these types of environments of course i'm worried but i'm not worried about revealing anything that isn't known got it i i think uh if anything i have a perspective which is pretty unique uh because i actually worked uh on the ground floor of a lot of the stuff as far as how it's been uh evolving and happening um i was never you know involved in any of the illegal side of it uh so i don't have a fear in that regard uh but yes i have a fear if you if you want to talk about fear uh i fear what uh what what my home country's gonna be in 10 years you know i i fear for the people that live in rural communities in mexico that have no cops no military to to go to just cartel members and seeing some of their daughters be made disappear after they go to a narco party somewhere that's what i fear you know that's not i fear a whole whole generation of people like me growing up with that as normal i grew up in mexico in the 80s and the 90s i wasn't that wasn't the stuff that i see now wasn't normal where do you live now you live in the states are you in america now i live in the states got it and where were you born in mexico what part of mexico were you in tijuana or you were born in tijuana i'm one of the rare i'm one of the rare tijuana natives uh most people in tijuana even when i would go to school they would have the question who was born in tijuana you would see a few hands right it's mostly a transitory space i i it's it's an interesting tijuana san diego i used to go to revolution is it revolution avenue or boulevard revolution avenida it's an avenue uh avenue yeah now it used to be a revolution now it's uh the sixth street that goes across but that's the kind of the happening that was i tell you euro i used to go to revolution was 96 97 and it was insane over there different time and place uh it's very dead now as far as the the main strip it's actually kind of dead now um a lot of the tourism just got kind of went away after 9 11 it's kind of slow i remember uh i talked to a voodoo priest uh he was part of the commun haitian community that overnight sprang up in tijuana a few years back after the earthquake they they were trying to gain asylum in the u.s and they were denied so they stayed in they stayed in mexico in tijuana tijuana is very welcoming to people coming out like coming into it uh if they follow local rules that's the main thing right they're very protective they're very nativists uh the cops are corrupt though man i remember i remember how you know they would just it was for nothing would pull us over for nothing's like now i got to take you in for what i just got to take you in what are you talking about if you give me 50 bucks i'll let you go we nothing happened here says well give me 50 bucks you know what just give me 10 bucks you're like how quickly did you go from 50 to 10 bucks atm let's ride to the atm or how much did they pay us right or i don't know like that that is a classic tijuana thing specifically for tourists that is the tijuana municipal police has always had that fame uh you know uh it was actually better if you went deeper if you would go to is it masatlan that has the papasan beer who had the papas and beer i don't know which one a chain it's a chain it's everywhere yeah it was when you would go five hours deeper you were actually a little bit more chill and the cops were a little bit more friendly but uh tijuana was interesting they if they if they knew you had money they're gonna come to you they're gonna try to get some kind of money from you well this uh this buddha priest said about tijuana when he came there right uh tijuana is like a weird occult mecca right there's a bunch of different stuff going on there so all of a sudden we add voodoo with voodoo into it you know santa muerte malverde and all of a sudden the voodoo was going on and i talked to him about it as like oh usually in the community that we would move in you know voodoo was like we would come in there there was nothing like it you guys have all this weird stuff happening here no wonder uh tijuana is just one big crossroads to call the devil that's what he did he talked about a voodoo guy tijuana was just one big cross road you uh you know i love my hometown um it's uh it's one of the you know it was a beautiful it was a beautiful place to grow up uh it was a fun place uh it produces some pretty interesting children like myself um and it and it kills me to see it uh in one and one some of the top most dangerous cities uh list on the planet um it's uh it it definitely it definitely has a lot of potential as a city and uh it kills me that it's uh that this problem is kind of rife within it i have very good memories of tijuana man i mean i it's the stories that you want to tell to your uh 22 year old son one day you're not probably right now but later on when he's grown up you may share some of those stories and you may journal it when you're 75 years old but you keep it till you're 75 to share some of those stories but ed i got to tell you man i had a bla i'm looking at my phone i'm like how the hell did an hour and a half go by so quickly i mean you're first of all you're a great storyteller number two uh uh your optics giving it to people who are not in it and you're giving your perspective it's so revealing of what you're seeing in the news someone like you who is actually in it to tell us uh uh gives a lot of insight and the word you use multiple times perspective so i appreciate you for coming out and being a guest hopefully if anything happens in the future as well that we want to get some invite we'll invite you back and you come back and join us definitely uh again thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to talk about uh some of these experiences and uh there are good people uh in the fight down there just putting it out there that's good to know something tells me i i you know uh the insurance company i run is 54 latino mexican and not mexican 50 50 latino and we have 17 000 agents and a lot of them are from michoacan jalisco sinaloa sakatecas you know oaxaca guerrero all these they have so much pride about their homeland it's such a beautiful thing to see my nanny melva who's been with us now for 10 years she would consider grandma i mean i told her from day one i said i don't want you to sing to them in english i don't want you to talk to my kids in english i just want you to speak to my kids in spanish all my kids all three of them speak spanish i mean they're pretty much mexican they don't even know they may be half middle eastern and white but they definitely have that mexican mexican uh culture in them they've grown up eating mexican mexican food from their nanny but it's a very special culture special community of people i love them they're family to me and again thanks for being a guest ed thank you so interesting stories you know completely different perspective for somebody that was in it and saw what was going on military marines sf cops cartel different cartel rafa quintero you know el chapo the level the new ones coming out very different perspective on what's really going on in mexico and you could tell he loves this country by the way we could totally tell you he loves his country so i want to curious about your thoughts what you took away from the interview with ed calderon uh and at the same time if you enjoyed this interview you want to know a little bit more about this i did an interview with the last narc documentary a series called the last narc with the story of hector berrelez if you've not watched it click over you to watch that and if you've not subscribed please do so thanks for watching everybody take care bye

Channel: Valuetainment

Views: 1,624,662

Keywords: ed calderon, ed calderon mexico, ed calderon rogan, valuetainment interviews, patrick bet david and ed calderon, mexican mafia, mexican cartel, narcos mexico

Id: Um5YUnpzxTc

Length: 88min 40sec (5320 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020