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Julian Dorey Podcast
#427 - “Complete DESTRUCTION!” - Narco Death Zones, Iran & CIA’s Mexican Hit Squads | Stefano Ritondale
03:20:06
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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.
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Not available in all states. Stefano, thanks for coming, man.
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Thank you so much for having me. Great.
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B
Katarina Schultz said you're like one of the guys to talk to when it comes to intel on the ground in Mexico with the cartels.
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A
I mean, Katarina is a great friend both of viewers of mine, you know, she's awesome. So shout out Katarina. Thank you so much. I know she's the one who put us in touch, so. So I really appreciate it. But yeah, I mean, I've been focusing on Mexican cartels. It started out as a hobby and hobby it was.
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B
I have a hobby of like focusing on the cartels just like one day, you know.
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A
All right, so that's a good question, right? So how did this happen? Well, you know, know, I was, you know, former army and while I was active duty, still I did a lot. I deployed to Jordan during, you know, Operation Inherent Resolve, which was the whole counter ISIS fight, Right. And when I was in Jordan and even before that when I was in college, I really liked back then Twitter, like the growing of this open source intelligence community, right? Like, oh my God, like, these guys are really good at what they do. And, and I even saw during my time when I was deployed, like, oh my God, you know, Twitter, there's a lot of information that gets pushed there that is extremely well that a lot of us use.
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B
Right.
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And so I, I thought to myself one day, you know, I was an active duty, and I realized that on the English speaking side, because, you know, I'm a first generation American. My mom was born in Mexico, my dad was born in Argentina, so I speak fluent Spanish. I lived in Spain.
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B
And when you had native Argentinian.
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A
Yeah, my dad was. Yeah, yeah, he, he was born and raised. And then he moved like in his 20s to Italy. Grandfather was Italian. All right, you gotta ask these questions.
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B
I'm just saying, you know.
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A
No, he moved, but I think my grandfather moved there in 1910 when he was a kid. So. But I have to put that there. All right, but. And my mom from Mexico and I had family in Mexico. And so I started to realize that even before I really got into, involved in like kind of the cartel dynamics, that all these OSINT accounts on Twitter back in the day were very focused On Russia, Ukraine. Right. They were focused on the Middle East. There were some that focused on Africa, but for some reason, like South America and Mexico specifically was ignored from the English speaking side. And it's crazy because on the Mexican Twitter and in Mexican social media, there's a huge swath of these cartel observers. And cartel like you would call cartel OSINT accounts, like back, back in that day. Right. Massive and amazing information. It just seemed like really weird, like, huh, why isn't that on the English side? And so while I was on active duty, I did kind of two missions. I was a battalion S2, which is like the intelligence officer. I did four weeks, I went to Mexico to train the Mexican army.
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B
It was me trained the Mexican army.
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A
Yeah, we trained the Mexican military police. Before the National Guard was created, it was the Mexican military police. I was with a military police unit in el Paso, the 93rd MP Battalion.
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B
Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help.
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A
Thank you. And they sent us four weeks to Mexico to train them as me, another officer and two NCOs. Non Commissioned Officers. Best army experience I ever had. I mean, really. Oh my God.
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B
You weren't worried about them working for the cartel?
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A
No, no. So we went to Mexico City and then there's a. It's like outside. So it was during the week we would be in this Mexican military base and in the weekend they would drive us to the hotel and, and like, like prime Mexico City. In the weekends we would do whatever we want. I had family there, so they would pick me up. I mean, it was great. But interacting with the Mexican military police was amazing. I mean, these guys, right, like if you, you know, like I said, I was deployed to Jordan. You know, a lot of us in the army are very used to working with like the Middle Eastern militaries. I, I did another mission in Niger, for example, also five weeks. And you kind of like there's moments where you start, like you pull your hair, you're like, why? You know, the professionalism isn't there or they don't get it, or they're more in the military because they want title rather than, let's say, the service. You know what I mean? Like, there's a lot of that and you could talk to anybody who said that. But when you go to Mexico, no, these guys are there because, you know, love of country, right? They are passionate about it and they're a professional force. And so training them was Great. Because it was like, oh, I get to train a professional force, which, by the way, could teach us some things, right? Like their ability to do, for example, like in the military, the MPS and the US mps, technically, it's like we can do. We're supposed to do, like, riot control, right? That's like one of the mission sets, right? That supposed to do. The Mexican military police, they would. Back then, before the national guard, they would also do riot control. But, like, when we were there, we realized, man, these guys do ride control way better than us. Like, what are we. What are we going to teach them? Because they do it all the time. I remember we were in the base, and there was a moment in the. They had an exercise where they had, like, literally soldiers acting as protesters, right? It was an exercise. And then they had the unit that was getting, like, certified, right? And so they did this whole exercise, and it was like the. The. Like the. The evaluator said and go. It was insanity. I mean, this. The guys who were acting as the protest did not hold back. They were throwing. They fired firecrackers at them, rocks, sticks. They were great. There was a moment, I kid you not. They. We saw from the distance. They grabbed one of the guys on the riot control. He was in the line, pulled him out, and then the protesters managed to push the mps back. And then the guys who had the soldiers were beating him up.
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B
Oh, for real?
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Oh, dude, they were. So then the mps had to come in with the van with the water hose and just spray. Everybody fart. Like, they did not hold back. And we had a week of training. I remember this moment. We had, like, in our training material was like, you know, riot control for a week. And when we saw this, I remember we just looked at each other and we just crossed that hole off for the week. We're like, okay, we're not doing this. They don't need. I even put a note like, hey, if you want training, they can train us how to do this, because they don't. And then it was like, they called it end, and everybody just stood up. Hey, that was great, guys. We're really good. All right, compa. Muy biento. And then they just left, like, nothing. There's like, a dead guy. He just stood up, bruises. He didn't care. But, you know, that's the thing. They were extremely professional, and it was great experience. Yeah. Hey, man.
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B
I mean, that's like WWE professional.
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A
What is riot control? You know, you had a lot of cops here. You tell get one. That's right. You Know, riot control. Let's see what they say. Yeah, let's see the Knicks win New York in the finals. And then let's.
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B
Yeah, yeah. You haven't been to Philly, apparently.
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A
That's true. But, you know, so that deployment to Mexico, and then I did a border mission during the first Trump administration, the first time he sent guys to the borders, those two things kind of piqued my interest.
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B
Wait a minute. What did a border mission look like while you're in the Army?
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A
Yeah.
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B
And an active president sends you, I assume, to support border patrol, or.
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A
So it was totally separate. So it was. We went there in 2018. It was literally the first time he did this right before the midterm elections. It was October, November of 2018 that he sends us. And the reason why they did that was because that caravan from Guatemala was going up through Mexico.
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B
I remember that.
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Exactly. And so what caravan? So what they did was our unit and the MPs they sent because we kind of had, like, the NORTHCOM mission. We were like, the QRF is called Homeland Defense. And it's funny, when they briefed us, like, you guys don't do border security. That's. That's called disca. It's a whole term. And like, you guys don't do border defense. Don't worry about border defense. And the only mission we ever did was border defense. It's like, oh, my God. Okay, here we go. So what they did was they sent some of us, some of our units to, like, Southeast Texas, Brownsville, like, Laredo, that area. And then our battalion, they sent to San Diego. And then we. We were under the Marine Corps, the SP. Magtaf. Okay. So we were part of that. And I remember in the briefing when the caravan. There was really two routes they could take. They could take the quickest route, which was through basically hugging the. Almost like the Caribbean coast. And then they would head up to Brownsville, Texas. The problem there, though, that was the most dangerous because back then, the Gulf Cartel civil war was terrible. So. And they were specifically targeting migrants because it was easy money for them, especially extortion.
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B
Yeah.
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Or they could take the long route, which back then was the safest route, which was San Diego. And that's where we, you know, were sent in. And we. And that's where the caravan actually, for the most part, ended up was in San Diego. And to your point, all art. Yeah, we were just. We were, like, standing there waiting. We were just waiting. The Border Patrol was the lead. And then we would, like, do build Constantino Wire over the border wall. And you know, the marines would build it and us as the. Well, I was the, the intel officer. I wasn't doing that. But the mps would like protect the marines who were the engineers that were building the concertina wire. And they would do that all across the border. Right. We had that in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, everywhere. But what was funny was even back then, like, they still do this. The problem of Constantino wire is like you can't just set it up and then just leave. It's not its design. So even if you put it on top of the border wall, so what they would do is people in Mexico would go to the border wall, see the concert, they would steal it. Oh, and then they would sell it in Mexico.
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B
That's not great.
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A
And so it was like, so it was just this non stop, you know, thing. Now as an intel officer, you have to be very, there's very strict laws in place because of the whole Vietnam War and Cold War. Like you can't collect on Americans and you can't do anything in the.
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B
Tell you. He can't.
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Oh, I can tell you we. I was a severe, you know, I'm telling you, I was, I'm glad you followed the rules. I followed it a million person actually. Like, good for you. So it would, you know, we would have soldiers come up to us like, you know, hey, hey, this person, you know, was harassing us or taking pictures or stuff like that. You know, just reporting a. Soldiers do. Hey, this happened. And my first question is, does this happen in the US side or the Mexican side? It was like, US side. I was like, all right, don't talk to me. I cannot, I have to assume that's a US person that's called us. You know, I cannot be involved with that. I can't get an email about that. I can't talk. Go. You know, you have to talk to like, you know, law enforcement or other elements within the army. You can't tell that to an mi. My whole focus was south of the border, so the caravan, right? Anything that happened, so that was fair game for me. But anything north, absolutely not. So they're very strict about that. Like extremely strict. I know most people might not believe
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B
that, but they're strict in one place,
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A
a lot of places.
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B
Read this. Fisa. They're not too strict in other places. But you know, I obviously like, that's also literally a geographical jurisdiction in and of itself because you're at the point of the border and you're watching this and it's like well, that happened there. That didn't happen there. So it makes it a little easier than, I guess stuff when you're looking at wiretaps or if someone's flying with a multinational company somewhere and things like that. That's where it gets a little weird. But how long were you there?
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When you think like six weeks. It was like right before I went, I determined I was going to leave actually my, I was going to what's called ets, like get out of active duty. I actually had to extend it because of this to the border because they didn't have a replacement for me to cover down. But it was like six weeks. So when I did that, between that and the Mexico mission that I went there, that happened both in 2018. That's when I decided why, well, let me try to cover Mexican cartels. And like as a journalist, as a hobby, as a, like I guess, I mean, I don't like calling myself an OSINT account. I don't consider myself oent account. People might call me that. I, I just, I, I think OSINT is a different type of category that is more relevant. Like if I track for example cartel members on social media, their messaging groups, they're all that. And I used to do this all the way back in 2021. Like there's some OINT aspect of that, but not really.
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B
I get it. Your, your pronouns are they, them.
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A
I understand that, that, that. But it started out just as, as a hobby, that then became much more professional. Now kind of actually that whole reasoning is why now, you know, we're. I'm a co founder or company Artorias. You know, it's an open source intelligence company that uses AI to collect and analyze and alert information. And as the, you know, that all happened because of my account on Twitter, all source news because the group of people I met, we kind of created this company. Now we have for example for the consumer Sit Rep. It's a global OSINT app that you can download and you can see what it actually entails. Because I think, we think that's the future. As Internet explodes and kind of grows around the world, AI is primed to be able to analyze large data sets and information. And so that's why. And we use it also to track Mexican cartels and kind of the activities that they do.
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B
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A
Well, I was. I was techn. No, by then I was in the reserves. I wasn't active. I was in the reserves and then I was a contractor, but for the government. But yeah, but I was a reserve. Yeah.
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B
So when you're a reserve, slash a contractor, you were allowed start this account and ask.
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A
I didn't, you know, don't, you know, didn't ask.
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B
Okay. Apologize later. Permission. It all worked out.
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A
All my things that I did with the government had nothing to do with Mexican cartels. Like, that's one thing. Like, I did. Like, my focus as a contractor was I actually focused on like our adversaries, their ballistic missile programs, cruise missiles and drones. Specifically how they would employ them in conflict with a special emphasis on Iran. So like the Iranian. But yeah, right. February was very interesting for me this year.
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B
Both cartel take that detour real quick.
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A
So yeah, that was my focus for six years as a contractor was that system because I worked for an air defense unit. And so I would build. Like when those units had before they deployed, they had to get a training exercise to like certify they could deploy. So I was like building all the exercises that and I would build the enemy the ballistic missile force for them to train and fight against and do that.
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B
All right, so I actually let's totally take this detour because that's. You were literally working in the belly of the beast of analyzing what Iran may have or doesn't have. First of all, how are what types of intelligence sources from the contracting army side are you getting to be able to determine what weaponry they actually.
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A
I mean that's all government intelligence. I mean there is obviously OSINTS involved in that but for the most part anything like that we're talking now like classified.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Government type of stuff. You know that kind of from a multi agency in Iran is always going to be one of the priorities for the intelligence community. And so that's kind of where the vast majority of the information we use and then you analyze not only one of the things I would say is a lot of times this might be a little bit too specific. I feel, I felt like a lot of people would focus more on like this missile can do X, Y and Z. It can fi this long, it can maybe do this little thing like it was very much centered on the missile system. And what for me and what we were doing, like that really is not as important for us because what we're training is how you're going to respond to them using let's say hundreds of missiles. So like in the end of the day one individual missile system and how they operate and all that. That would be more for let's say the guys who are working the patriots and say you know, like hey how do we. There's this new system in place. How can we defeat this one missile system? My focus more was forget, let's just say all out war broke out. How are these people going to employ hundreds of missiles in a war? And how the. And, and, and that was something that you know, the military and the army because of the global war on terror kind of like and coin and you hear this a lot like Russia, Ukraine and all that. Like a lot of that was kind of forgotten or not forgotten, not, not emphasized enough. And so now Obviously now in February 2026 with everything happening and in the U. S Iran war that's kind of recentered itself and become a major focus because now we get to see it for really the first time a country employ or even in 2025 with the Israel Iran 12 day war. That's when we really saw mass quantity of ballistic missiles launched in the first time in history. And in many aspects a lot of countries are developing those capabilities to employ it and we've seen it with Russia and Ukraine as well. A Chaiwan, a China Taiwan scenario as well. And so that's more where I wanted to focus on because when I was back and it was more like that individual system and what they can do rather than the holistic picture from a doctrinal perspective how they would fight.
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B
Okay, so when you were looking at
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A
it though back in 2018-2019-2020-2019 till I guess like 2024.
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B
Okay, so yeah, so not that long before the, the 12 day war. You know, I guess the first question is what kind of weaponry capabilities did Iran have relative to what other countries even in the region have right there?
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A
I mean Iran has the largest ballistic missile force in the Middle east. Right. I mean that is a known fact. And they really prioritize that ballistic missile force. And one of the things that they did a lot was you know they got from like the Soviet and all that and the ballistic missiles and they really understand and realize look, we can't, we're not going to develop the most advanced fighter jet, we're not going to develop the most advanced naval vessel. So the way that we can have a deterrence and even an offensive capability of strike back is one through the ballistic missile program. And then it expanded into their drone program, especially the one way attack drones. So now like for example the Shahed 136 is with the, they gave it to the Russians and the Russian called the Der Dron 2. That's a drone that very not sophisticated at all but very effective at what it's designed to do which is go and do, you know, pinpoint and go and conduct strikes utilizing a drone. And so yeah that, that's the one
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B
has it up the Hesa Shahed 136.
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A
Yeah. So the Hessa is the, the kind of the maker. Right. That's like our Lockheed Martin stuff like that. But that would be the one that's the head 136 and then the Russians, their equivalent is called the drawn two and they used it extensively in Ukraine and it's kind of. And, and the Russians kind of took, the Iranians taught the Russians about these like a lot of the ballistic missiles specifically and the drones and how to employ that. Right. Because the Iranians were, were really developing these capabilities for years and years of decades and they, they kind of became almost like the subject matter experts and these capabilities because they understood this is how we can deter defeat the United States or Saudi Arabia etc and if anything other countries have taken notice and kind of followed A similar path in that to do that. But y mean so that's why when this all this happened. But I would kind of push back heavily in some of the reporting like oh how did we not know about this? Did we do you know I would knew so I would just, I'm going to quote General Votel who was one of the former US Central Command Commanders and General McKenzie who was also a former center CENTCOM commander and both on the media both said no we knew about this. Like that is not up for debate. Like we knew about this, we've done this, we understand it both from the naval blockade, from the drones, from the ballistic missiles and I think the problem is there is a one a misunderstanding on just what I really focus on was again I was a low level analyst and the huge pyramid of U S Central Command like I was at the bottom of the food chain there specifically to train guys and, and these kind of capabilities within very, you know, military exercise and simulated exercises. Right. To meet training objectives. But I think people mistake and say oh I it's almost like oh I didn't know they had this capability. So that means the US government didn't know and oh because Iran did. X well nobody could have suspected they were going to bomb Dubai. Well yes. What the you expect exactly. What are you talking about? Yes, right. And then, but then it's then there's a misunderstanding of okay well then how the UAE fights, Saudi Arabia fights, the US Fights and all the like the things that happen behind the scenes and people try to oversimplify that response and I think that's a fundamental issue where a lot of that reporting kind of gets erroneous and wrong because when I you know was kind of seeing things develop I was like, I was like oh yeah that's yeah like we, we kind of knew. Yeah that's exactly what they were going to do and this is how the U S is going to have to respond to that etc. So it's. Yeah, I think it's when not that many people really focus so much on the ballistic missile. That's when I realized even in the, in the think tank world, right. And the most of the people outside of the news organization they're going to get their analysis from think tanks. It became pretty clear that it wasn't a major focus for the majority of media organizations and think tank and I think that's kind of like, I don't want to say contaminated but kind of misinterpreted what is actually going on and how the U.S. military plans to respond because again, if you have two CENTCOM commanders said we knew about this. Yeah, I'm sorry, X account on Twitter, don't argue that you know more than two former CENTCOM commanders who live this for years.
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B
Sure. So you weren't looking though at the nuclear program or anything like that. You were strictly on the ballistic side.
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A
And then the drones, the cruise missiles.
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B
And the cruise missiles.
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A
And so like, I mean think of it like this. Like my, our job was think of a scenario because we had to train these guys and not only Iran, but anywhere. And. And the other way that the army trains a lot specifically or joint exercises if it's multiple, like army, air Force, navy. So you can have it like specific. Take like a specific thread template or you make up a country. So there's a whole made up universe in the army. Like you can actually Google it. It's called date. So if you Google date army, they have these whole made up countries, right? They have Denovia Ariana.
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B
Wasn't that in the movie Princess Bride?
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A
Yeah, that's it.
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B
Oh, that was, that's right.
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A
So that's date world. Right. So they literally. And these are great guys. Like I, when I was in the army, when I was a contractor, I would work with these. This organization specifically under U.S. training. Well back then it was U.S. training command, U.S. tRADOC and specifically the G2, the intelligence sector. Like their whole job is to make these world ups. And so they have. And so for example, you'll have like, oh, the Pacific. It's. I think it's a schm. Yeah, whatever name you can think of. Here's the capabilities. Like that's literally.
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B
See like yeah, Ariana, Atopia, Denovia Gorgas. These are hard as fuck. Le Maria Pertini. And then into Indo Pacific. Bagginsate Belizea Gabal Himaldesh. Yeah, no, I, I think some countries need to get some rebranding. It's pretty good.
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A
But like that's literally. You know. And so then what you do is then you, then you can say, okay, well that country Ariana has. Because then you look up at the World Equipment Guide. So for example, you want to know, hey, that's your head 136 outside of Wikipedia. Well, what's the range? Because you know, you can say, I don't trust Wikipedia. World Equipment Guide. The WEG in the army and the WAG literally lays out like from an unclassified perspective, all they're like, hey, this is like that's it. So right there, put shahead 136 and this is available for anybody, right? Like anybody can access this. As you can see, you don't need to. There you go. Like even that one or. Yeah, whichever one. And you
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B
should head 1, 3, 6.
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A
Yeah. And then. And you could see, right. The drawn two. And then you could go variance, systems, dimensions. This is cool, right? Cost.
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B
This is like fantasy football for how to kill people.
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A
And they have this for everything. You can look up T90s T72s, probably the Leclerc tank, you know, whatever you want. And it's a whole, it's all right there for people to focus and analyze. And then in these exercises, in these made up worlds, you then grab and say. Because you can even, you can even look up at the, like in the scenarios, they have it pre built. Like they have the. They already have. Like Ariana's 10th division is. Is this, this, this. And so you can just say, okay, I want this guy, I want this guy and I want this guy right there. Yeah, Eurasia. And then you can look Ariana 4. Structure, operational environment. It's like a whole story.
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B
Whoa.
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A
And then you can just publicly available. And these are. Yeah, this is for anybody. And you could just click on it
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B
and imagine what you have back there.
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A
Well, that's, you know, infrared. And then on the right side you can see equipment breakdown. So you have the command and then the brigades, and then you click on the brigade. They had the, you know, the battalions. The battalions, the companies, the companies, the platoons team, like everything you can imagine. And so in a lot of these exercises, especially in the unclassified world, we just say, I want this, this, this, this, this is the operational environment. And go. And then you build, you know, the exercise and you do that.
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B
And so you knew in 20, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, at least roughly as you laid out what the capabilities are for a country like Iran and what they might do in a war game scenario. Yeah, because like, like our Middle Eastern correspondent Nico Aronson was in Dubai, like right before the bombing started, and they were like shocked that all this shit was getting bombed. But you were probably sitting at home
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A
going, I mean, I remember.
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B
That's about right.
- [26:32]
A
I remember even writing articles, you know, through the company, like, and all that. I was like, I actually had an interview published afterwards, and I said, hey, if this happens, like, anticipate airspace to close. Like, the thing was, if you go, if Trump. Because back then Trump was saying, regime change, regime change. Like that was part of the conversation. It's like if they go for regime Change. All bets are off. Oh, yeah, because that's. Because then what. What is Iran going to do? Right. And so that's the thing like. And so. And again, I want to preface this very important. We're talking about war games and military exercises. I have a. This is another pet peeve of mine. Military exercises are, or war games are designed to meet training objectives. They're not designed to see who won.
- [27:15]
B
Okay, wait, that's not where I thought you were going.
- [27:18]
A
So that. So, so people need to understand when you do so out, unless you're like at the highest level. Right. And some of those conversations would be, for the most part, training exercises are designed and military exercise is designed because you have training objectives you want to meet. Right. And so the com. And so the commander is the one who decides that. So the training objective can be, for example, I want to strain our logistics. This is a broad base. Right. Because how you do it is. And these are all things you can look at specifically in the Army. So each army unit has what you called your mission essential task. Task. So the army basically says you're an mp, you're a military police unit. These are your mission essential tasks that. No, I don't. These are the things you need to know what to do. Do I expect an MP to be an intelligence analysis? No. So that's not a missional essential task. Riot control, for example, could be one of them. Right. So based on your mission essential task, then you build training objectives around that. Because in the end of the day, you want to see if you get certified. And so when you build exercises and you design it, you do it mostly under the premise of saying, I'm trying to meet the commander's training objectives. So if I have to do between realism or meet training objective, training objective is going to be higher a priority. Right. And so this is where. And so, for example, this kind of goes back. It's called the sandbox, because then you make up a scenario.
- [28:34]
B
Yes.
- [28:35]
A
That in reality, for example, you're going to have, more than likely you're an army unit doing operations. More than likely you'll have air support. Right. But I can say in this scenario, nope, I don't want you to have air support at all, because I want you to train as if you don't. Oh, I'm gonna flip a switch and say all communications has been shut down because our adversary just shut down all our satellites. So fight, you know, analog without anything. Right. Like there's no redundancy. All else went to fail. Go fight and execute that because you're trying to see, you're trying to train your units on these certain objectives and then people get that end result. Well, we had this amount of casualties, this amount of casualties, this. And then they say then this is where I'm getting back to, oh, Iran. And this military exercise destroyed 10,000American soldiers. Okay, wait, that's not the perfect example is. I think there's a very famous one where it was like a marine general, I can't remember, I think in 2003 or 2001 where he used speedboats to, and and then those seed boats. He managed to sink an aircraft carrier.
- [29:37]
B
Right, with speedboats.
- [29:38]
A
And it's in a simulation. It was a simulated exercise. Right, but that, you see that reaction. That's my criticism. So it's like, okay, wait, wait, what were the training objectives? What was the lit. And then what happened was after the exercise, after they sunk the, the aircraft carrier, the criticism is oh well, they just re put the aircraft carrier there and then they continue operating. It was like, well, well yeah, because let's just, just pretend. Let's say this is a naval exercise and the whole exercise is centered around defending the aircraft carrier. The Marine General destroys it. That one Millennium Challenge, that's the one 2000. I like the reporting on this infuriates me because it's like if it's centered on the aircraft carrying you sink it. Yeah. Okay, well what's the lessons learned? Okay, okay, we'll go back to this. We'll apply it AAR after action review. Let's apply all the lessons learned and what happened. Okay, now go back with these lessons learned, reconstitute the aircraft carrier and run the exercise. Now with these lessons learned because what you, you sink the aircraft. Oh, okay. A one week exercise is done. After 24 hours everybody can go home. No, like that's the thing. And I think people grab these things and you see that in the reporting and they over, they, they grab the wrong aspects of the exercise or they use it as gospel of the Bible rather than saying hey, in the end of the day these are made up scenarios because they're designed to meet a training object objective.
- [30:56]
B
And also, and this might be a little bit of an amateur way of looking at it from the total outside, but you're also getting this amount comes sometimes that are going to be like the 0.5 scenario and then it's, it's over delted if you will, is like oh, this is a 50 scenario because it was so easy.
- [31:12]
A
But that's not realistic, especially in simulations. Because there's like where I think when most people think of military exercises, like where you're wearing, you know, the soldiers and like that actually exists. But when you're dealing at large, large scale, generally a lot of these are simulated. I can give a perfect example. We did a military exercise, just a normal one from, for. For our. When I was in the mps and it was all simulated, right? So we. It was. It was centered on the staff of the unit. So you have your battalion staff, your brigade staff, and. And it was really centered on that. And so the line units, what we'd call like the companies and like the soldiers, a lot of that had to be simulated, obviously, because we didn't have. So there was a live component and then a simulation.
- [31:48]
B
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- [32:52]
A
Well, in the simulation, the. The adversary was not North Korea, but had a very similar force structure as North Korea. It was one of those made up countries. I was like, okay, this is North Korea. We all get it right now. In this exercise, what happened was somehow, don't ask me how they managed to get a regiment, which is about 3,000 soldiers, bypass the front lines and then that reg.
- [33:18]
B
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A
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- [33:40]
A
Encountered one of our companies, an MP company. Again all this simulated. They fought and I kid you not, the MP company, which is a couple hundred soldiers at most, managed to destroy 3,000. 3,000, you know, like not North Korean soldiers. But the MP company suffered 50 casualty rate. Okay, now for 200 against 3,000. They're 100 left now.
- [34:05]
B
Yeah, it's like 300 the movie.
- [34:07]
A
Do you believe for a second that that's real? No.
- [34:09]
B
No.
- [34:10]
A
Now do you now it's like don't fight the game. That's another thing in military you run with what happened. So what the, the scenario then was built around that because that happened. It was a fluke. Instead of saying okay, reset, we said no. So we're going to take this as an opportunity to train our staff in a mass casualty event. And now we have a unit that's combat ineffective. So how do we, how do we address that as a staff combat ineffective mass casualty event go. And that's what we did. But I can then by that logic and everything here. Oh, let me grab that. An MP company can kill an entire North Korean regiment. And I can write a whole article about that. And it's not a lie, but it's just not reality because it's simulation. And that's, that's where my kind of, my. The criticism of some of these and how this talk about from an exercise perspective, how those types of narratives, especially to the media, you can kind of manipulate and really push something that's not real or reality and how it's done. And some of that is even with Russia, Ukraine and the Ukraine and the drones, like yes, there's a lot of important lessons learned should be done. But that's one type of war that does not necessarily how the US or the west is designed to fight, which is much more air dominant centric. And, and that's not. Or, and we're. We're a maneuver centric force. And what we're seeing in Russia, Ukraine is positional warfare. And those are different things that although lessons are learned, we shouldn't like automatically assume one over the other.
- [35:26]
B
Got it. Well, again, because you were bet you ended up bouncing up very close to when this really did blow up. No pun intended. Yeah but like my first question would be whether it was the people you directly reported to or the things that were coming down the chain of command, like, tone wise, over the years that you were specifically looking at Iran as a potential threat threat, were you sensing at all that there was almost a push to, you know, go find the body so we can have the crime, so we can go do this again?
- [35:56]
A
That's not that. I was just a contractor designed for military exercises. And we had, we know, we track, you know, intelligence, all that. But like that, at the end of the day, that's where. That's more of a conversation at the National Security Council level, at the White House level. Like, that is a way down where we're at. And it's like, even, even the guys there were like, we're there to protect the soldiers with our equipment. The patriot. That is not what's done. But to get to your point, when we, when, when Trump was, you know, building up the troops in the Middle east, one of the things I was telling people is like, look, I don't know if Trump is going to do it, but if he wanted to do, if he wants to do it, these are the assets you want in place to do it. Right? Like that. So you, you can't analyze. In the end of the day, it's like any individual, you can't get in somebody's head, you can't get in Putin's head head, you can't get in chi jinping head, you can't get in Trump's head, you can't get in Macron's head. You can't. No, you just can't. So you have to look at everything around and even outside. Oh, well, this New York Times report, administration official says XYZ, but NBC says Y. 1, 2, 3. Okay, that's noise. Look at the hard data. What's hard data? Military movement, assets being deployed.
- [37:03]
B
Sure.
- [37:04]
A
That's how you start knowing something was different. Sure. Yeah. And again, every administration, elections matter. I mean, that's why say, you know, I was, I was there during the first Trump administration and then the Biden administrator, and then I left. And then, you know, here comes the second administration. If you love it or hate it, that's in the end of the day, what happened. But when people kind of were back then, oh, well, he said, no new words like, this guy killed General Suleimani right now.
- [37:25]
B
You were on duty when that happened? January 2020.
- [37:29]
A
So I was, funny enough, I was on vacation, and when I saw that, I was like, are you kidding me?
- [37:34]
B
What made you say that?
- [37:35]
A
Yeah, it was General Suleimani.
- [37:37]
B
Right.
- [37:37]
A
I mean, it's just like it was, it was just insane. It was like, what? What? Like it. It. And to the point where I would tell people, it's like. Like, I. I think people forget, like, how this all happened, because if memory serves me correctly, in 2019, in the end of 2019, there was a problem of pro Iranian militia groups in Iraq attacking US Forces in Iraq. And a contractor, if I'm not mistaken, or an American, died in one of these attacks. So then the US Retaliated, killed a bunch of these militia members. And what precipitated before the killing of Suleimani was the. These militia groups got a bunch of protesters to, quote, like, they stormed the US Embassy. They never breached it. They never got through, but they kind of went, like, past the initial gate, and they kind of stormed it. And then that ended with. After that, Trump said, okay, we're killing Suleimani. Like, holy.
- [38:28]
B
Yeah.
- [38:29]
A
And then what happened? Then Iran responded with the ballistic missile strikes against Al Assad air base in Iraq. Right. Where no Americans were killed, but hundreds suffered TBI injuries. Right. But, you know, I. That. That was. To me, I. I think, you know, I. A lot of us. I thought. A lot of us. Me, specifically, I thought after Salmani was killed, there was a belief in me that thought, man, Iran's gonna. They're gonna have to go hard on this response. Like, not, like, not the Al Assad. Yeah.
- [38:56]
B
And that's the thing that they didn't. They. They blinked. They did, you know, like. Like you said, they. They had the one strike. No one died. Yes, there. There were some casualties, which is never good. But, like. Like, that was the top dog. That was, like, he was the number two.
- [39:10]
A
Yeah.
- [39:11]
B
That was like taking out someone extremely high in a country. You would think, like, that would be the time where they'd launch some sort of ballistic missile towards maybe multiple countries and really inflict some pain. And they. Obviously, they had all the propaganda where, like, the Ayatollah was crying on air, had all the kids crying behind them. We're gonna avenge this. The whole bit. And they didn't, which was part of the reason why fast forwarding. You know, when you make the argument about Iran, it's. It's one of the most annoying conversations I have with anyone because you have to hold multiple thoughts at the same time. Right. So, yeah, they don't like us.
- [39:46]
A
Yeah.
- [39:47]
B
The regime is bad.
- [39:48]
A
Yeah.
- [39:48]
B
Their regime is tyrannical. They kill their people. This is. These are all horrible things. China kills the Uyghurs every day, and we're not fucking invading China. You know, unfortunately, you can't just go willy nilly, like be like, you know what, fuck it, I think I'll invade somewhere today just because I can't. That's not how the world works. And when you're dealing with a nation of 93 million people that has, as you know, a significant weapons arsenal to be able to respond and also inflict damage on other countries that aren't us, that are going to be pissed about it, who didn't make this decision, that creates a problem. So fast forwarding though from 2020 to 2025 before we get to what happened here. When you saw the 12 day war breakout and the bombing of, you know, places that you weren't covering from an intel perspective, but the bombing of Forda and nuclear sites in Iran, did you think that that was going to be the end of it or were you like, oh, this is, I, I, I,
- [40:38]
A
it was very interesting. I, the fact that it was an Israel Iran argued fight was very interesting. I can't, I mean obviously I can't go too much into details, right, because and, and it's like, you know, that that was, it was a very interesting dynamic that, that in many aspects I think in our minds. And how if you were to ask me in 2023, let's say, or 2024. Well, let's not say 2024 because October 7th really changed everything. 2022, 2023, right before October 7th, if there was a scenario where Iran and Israel were kind of going at it and the US kind of didn't get involved, that would have been very interesting to me because it kind of would have shattered kind of my presumptions, my assumptions and how things would have operated and worked. Right. Like so, so but what was interesting is Israel was the one who initiated the attack against Iran. Right? That was a very interesting development. And I think where Iran, Iran was blinking ever since October 7, 2023.
- [41:37]
B
What do you mean blinking?
- [41:38]
A
Because what happened was you enabled Israel to go one by one and pick off the proxies, you, they managed to get off Hamas, then they managed to significantly weaken Hezbollah. Bashar Al Assad fell, they lost Syria. So that land bridge that they had to Hezbollah gone. So at some point and the Iranians weren't doing anything to respond. Right. And when Hama, like I think the worst case scenario that we all envisioned in the Middle east would have been October 7th, but with Hezbollah and Iran getting involved in all the proxies all at once. And I think Sinwar, the former Yanwa Sinwar, who the mastermind of the October. That's what he wanted.
- [42:18]
B
Wanted, yes.
- [42:19]
A
He wanted that to happen because in his idea was it was going to be enough to overwhelm Israel. And the interesting aspect though, from a US Perspective is we weren't focused on the Middle east in 2023. We were what we in 2023 was Russia, Ukraine, with Biden.
- [42:36]
B
Well, I know we have a big focus there, but you're saying we weren't focused at all.
- [42:40]
A
We were fo prior. What do you the priority wasn't the Middle East. If anything, there was a reduction of force in the Middle east because of what was going.
- [42:47]
B
Yeah.
- [42:47]
A
So you. So now you can start seeing this idea. Well, wait a it like after October 7th, what did the Biden administration do? They started to deploy a lot of forces to the Middle east to support it. But I think Yan was sinwar in his mind. He wanted the word that like that in his mind, in this very diabolical thought process of this is the moment Benjamin Nya, who's weakened politically. There was mass protests in Israel. The United States is consumed because of Russia, Ukraine, they're pulling out forces. We have the Axis resistance. There's nothing holding us back. Back. Now is the time. Yeah. And then he launched it and everybody was like, what are you doing? Like the access of resistance. In what universe are you thinking to the point where even Hezbo was like, I mean, yeah, we'll do some things in the movie. We're not going to. We're not going to do what you did. And so what happened was Israel then was. Was able to go one by one by one. And I think one of the detrimental facts was the loss of Syria for Iran. Bashar al Assad falling like that was a serious that if there's one thing that supply routes alone, if you're going to make a history book, let's say the collapse of the axis of resistance, the before and after is the fall of Bashar Al Assad. Right. I mean, that is the whole reason why Iran was so invested in Syria. And so that's why when, you know, on Tom Garrison in Syria, it's a huge aspect because of in reality it was, you know, oh, against. I said no, it was like against Iran. You know, that's why it was a huge component now going to 2025 when Israel conducted the strike against Iran, it was very interesting that Iran didn't target the US or the Gulf. That was very interesting. And it was interesting that Trump decided to bomb, you know, the nuclear facilities and then use that as an Excuse to end the fighting, right? It's like he. So the only thing I can think of was there concern in the administration that even though this was Israel, Iran, at some point Iran was going to say, okay, enough is enough. We're going to have to start targeting all these other countries and the U.S. u.S. To force them to stop with Israel. Because whatever you can hear what people say, oh, the Israelis were for, you know, they begged Iran. No, they, no, no, guys, they didn't like, I'm sorry, whatever universe you think of your operating end of. Israel had no necessity to stop. They had, they had none. They really didn't want to stop. Trump bombed the nuclear plants, the nuclear facilities and told Benjamin, you're done, you're out, we're done with this. I don't know if the reason why they did that is because they were concerned that Iran, what we saw now in February, was going to do some significant retaliation to force the Israelis to stop. Because I think people don't like the US has a lot of influence over Israel. I mean, I know people are going to talk AIPAC and Israel on the US People talk to Israeli nationalists like in Israel. Their main criticism is the influence that the US has on Israeli decision making.
- [45:30]
B
I mean that's just the ultimate projection I've ever heard in my life. That's ridiculous. I mean, eight months, dude, it, this went from in June 2025, the gun, we bombed all the nuclear capabilities. Total victory, it's over. To eight months later, we're putting our boots on the ground and it's our boots going there while they go and ethnically cleanse the fuck out of Lebanon. That's, I'm sorry, that's a one way street where a nation of 9 million people is basically telling our fucking president like a little bitch what to do. I don't understand how, how like if they're going to say the nationalists in Israel, oh, the US has too much influence here. In my opinion that's just because the psycho nationalists over there actually expect to have 100% influence and they're upset when they only get 99.
- [46:17]
A
So what I think people for the 2026 what was very like let's, let's look at 2026 and this is what, this is like. Why, why 2026? Why February 28, 2026? What was the reason? Because let's not forget what started in 2026 was the capture of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.
- [46:37]
B
Huh? Who's got a lot of oil and by the way, still under communist control right now. People forget about that.
- [46:44]
A
Well, I would say just taking a step back from Desi Rodriguez perspective, I would say you can talk to a lot of people like it is insane how. Yes. In name socialism and they love it and, but in reality, I mean they're doing what the US Tells them to do. Do. I mean it is like they tell, they told Des Rodriguez, stop sending oil to Cuba. Got it. Stop, stop. We're done. No issues. We're going to send our Department of Energy, you know, Secretary of Energy there. We're going to send our executives. We're going to do all this. Yep. The southcom commander, I think it's General Donovan, went to Caracas a less than a month after the capturing the bombing of Caracas and the capture the SOUTHCOM commander, the commander responsible for that operation a couple weeks later, later landed in Caracas to meet with them. Yeah, I mean, right. So, so now it was funny because going kind of tying the cartel to Iran, the, the thought process was, and you know, even me talking to people like, dude, Mexican cartels are next, the cartels are next. But I think what people really don't push too much emphasis on is the protests that happened in Iran. The, the, the protests in Iran, for some reason, one way or another fundamentally change the trajectory of US military might in the Western hemisphere to focus onto
- [48:02]
B
the Middle east and part of it. Here's the thing though. One of the reasons I hate having to argue about the Iran war is because the idea of even having to slightly steel man radicals who run that country, which is what they are. Let's not, let's not get it twisted, is so intellectually annoying to me. Yet I get forced to do it because I believe it was in January. Scott Bessant, who you know is our Treasury Secretary, was running around Davos on camera bragging about the sanctions he was putting on Iran and bragging about the fact that he was going to take their currency effectively to zero.
- [48:42]
A
Which it is.
- [48:43]
B
Which it is.
- [48:44]
A
Yep.
- [48:44]
B
Which he then said would force people into the streets and cause protests and because they know that the regime is crazy, they would kill those people. He, I don't even think in his defense, he mentioned the fact that we were going to try to arm the Kurds, which you know, went totally ass backwards with that and foment a lot of this. He definitely didn't mention the fact about Mossad's involvement in that operation. That's fine, that's not his world or whatever. But I look at that and I go, if I see a psycho down the street on, on the side of the street having a crack. Crackhead freak out or something and I go and load a weapon. Weapon for him and I hand it to him and I say have fun.
- [49:23]
A
Yeah.
- [49:24]
B
I get charged in court.
- [49:26]
A
Yeah. But that's where the difference between us as individuals and governments, they don't, we don't play with. They don't play the same rules as we do.
- [49:32]
B
They don't play with the same rules as we do. But which by the way, when I look at it that way, I, I cannot like. I'm not going to criticize other government governments, whether it's Iran or Israel and not also criticize my own.
- [49:43]
A
Oh yeah. And what I would say is what's. If you look at, at the, the. The. Because you're right because the, the currency the real is worthless. I mean it is just. And it's continuously to go on to freefall. But I, I would say that the Iranian regime and the Islamic Republic it also in their mindset because it can be. There's, I think there's can be multiple truths at once. Because right now we're doing this by the way, at Cuba. Right? The blockade against Cuba, the stopping of the oil is to cause the electrics, you know, the electricity to go out. Out and then force people on the street. And then you. And then we indicted Raul Castro, the former president. Right. And it's the same night because it's kind of falling in some ways of Venezuela model. They're doing it in the Cuba model. And then they ran like this is something that, that this administration is really doing. And then Iran, I think there's a, there's a, there's there's a. The history of the protests in Iran here is very well documented. And the, and the US Government's argument is we're, we don't have, we're not forced to do business with anybody if we can force go same with Iran because they pick and choose news. What was interesting after though, going to my point when I was saying when the protest ended there was. I think we can all remember there was like reports that Trump might have done like a symbolic. He was gonna do a strike against Iran. Yes, because of the protest. Because he said that true social. No protest killed, et cetera, et cetera. But what did we see then afterwards was a massive deployment of U. S. Combat power to the Middle east at that point. That's what going back, it's like you can, you know, you can talk to your sources in the cabinet, you can talk about this. It doesn't matter matter what are they planning? And that's what I would focus on a military exercise going back to the original thing is like do I build a military exercise where I'm deploying forces, I have all the forces or I have none the forces that's, that's the parameters are set. So when we, when I saw that, I'm like they're is war gonna happen? I don't know. But I can tell you for a fact the option is there. And if they're going to do it, it's going to be big. And it's not going to be what we saw the fordo that just the nuclear bombing of the facility. Natanz. No, it was going to be if you wanted to do regime change, this is how you're going to do it. And then the US Responded. And what's again, when I get kind of, you know, I got criticized for this for a lot what I would tell people from my own experience, like people might not believe me but I was like, I expected Iran to do a lot more damage and be a lot worse than what I saw.
- [51:55]
B
Really?
- [51:55]
A
Yeah.
- [51:56]
B
Why?
- [51:57]
A
Because again they did do damage. They did, but not, not to the degree that I thought they were going to be. Right. So look at the, the amount of missiles and drones were interesting like the amount of missiles and drones that were launched and the kind of the trajectory. Now the argument people make as well, they wanted to extend it. They needed that deterrence which is true. They generally, Iranians want to do some of the extended etc like they had an understanding but then that shows that there was a significant degradation that they weren't able to sustain large scale attacks at the beginning. Right. So I think the first couple of days is when Iran had and I think this is when you go into military might. Right. What is the goal of the US at this point from a military perspective at the beginning of the war is you do the initial strikes against the command and control elements but the number one priority for the U s always going to be destroy the air defense. We want to destroy their air defense so we can enable our fighter jets to operate freely over Iran.
- [52:44]
B
Right.
- [52:45]
A
So while we're focusing on that, that's a window of opportunity for Iran to launch their attacks to try to halt our ability to do that. What the Iranians were more focused on doing though was yes, they struck some military, they struck military bases and their damages. We knew this because what are one of the things that happened, happened before the war started. We evacuated bases.
- [53:06]
B
Right.
- [53:06]
A
Especially the one close because again we Knew this is what they're going to do, pull these guys out. Because those military bases were built with the mindset of Al Qaeda, Iraq, the Taliban, not against a country with the largest ballistic missile force there. And you have to, you have to take into account they have a threat. So that would. Hold on, back up a minute.
- [53:26]
B
Yeah, that's interesting. I never heard someone put it that way before. Those bases are designed thinking about Al Qaeda and some of these terror groups and stuff, but not about countries that could have a significant.
- [53:37]
A
So think of it in the sense of if you put up a lot of these bases, for example, IUD air base in Qatar. Right. And we still have people there. Right. And you're building that. You build it. Look at the distance between Qatar to Iran. Very short.
- [53:51]
B
Yeah. So far.
- [53:52]
A
What is one of the largest arsenals that Iran has in their ballistic missile program? Short range ballistic missiles.
- [53:57]
B
And what's the, what's the official range?
- [54:01]
A
I would say so it depends who you ask and all that
- [54:05]
B
conservative.
- [54:06]
A
I'm gonna be very careful. A couple hundred miles and I'm just gonna leave it very kind of vaguely in that.
- [54:10]
B
Okay.
- [54:11]
A
Just to make sure. But for example, one of the platforms I would recommend people to look up for example the fate 110 or the f a t e h110 or f a t e h313.
- [54:21]
B
Okay.
- [54:22]
A
So you can look those up. The fate 110 or fate 313. These are Iranian short range ballistic missiles that have a very, these are very effective, one of the largest that they have in the arsenal. Right. Short range ballistic missiles. These were designed in many aspects to target those US Military bases. So when, so those military bases. Although yes, a lot of that was because of Iran and containment, etc. The question is there's a, there's a thought processes during peacetime and during war. So when war happened, those military bases right there along the coast, I'm not sitting there. They have more ballistic missiles than we have interceptors. Let's make this clear. We know they have more drones. Like we know this. So the question then is when you build military installations, it's like this, it's like, it's like the Cold War. This is the argument. The U S. Military bases in West Berlin. Yeah. They were built in the mindset of the Soviet Union for containment and you know, all this and messaging. But, and, but if the, if the Soviets decided to invade West Berlin, was there a fighting chance in hell that those soldiers were going to survive? No, let's be real. The guy like if the Soviet Union ever decided to invade West Berlin. There's the West Berlin US Forces there. We're not going to stop it. And so the thought process in. In the Middle east is when you're building these bases, yes, in a containment perspective, and they're there for error, but the moment war happens, those just become prime targets.
- [55:42]
B
Right.
- [55:42]
A
And they become almost like in a way, a liability. They become a liability, and they weren't designed in this mindset of how now the US Military is going towards this, like, less. Where I also go back to like this building of these massive forward operating bases. Massive bases, like with the burger kings and the, you know, the green beans and all that. That was a, you know, a G. Watts mindset.
- [56:04]
B
Yeah.
- [56:04]
A
And now with Russia, Ukraine, China, Taiwan, even with Iran, a lot of that mindset is, no, you have to be expeditionary. You still need some of these large scale bases to project power for air combat, for refueling, supply, logistics. Absolutely. But you're not going to do what we have now, which is all this ring around Iran of these large infrastructures that you can't do anything with it. And Iran knows I just need to hit those because then I can go into the information space and say, ha, look, see, I hit you guys. And then. Then they say, oh, my God, how did we not expect. It's like, well, I mean, yes, we did. Why do you think we evacuated soldiers?
- [56:36]
B
Yeah. Now, once it did, obviously you correctly point out when you're. When you're deploying all those assets to the middle east at the rate they were, forget even just the scale, of course you're planning on doing something and at some point that's going to happen. Nonetheless, the goalposts of what, like the goals of the war was supposed to be seemed to constantly move. Like at the beginning it was like, we want a regime change, Iran. And I talked to a couple sources a week before the actual invasion, or like five days, three to five days before the invasion, after John Kiriakou had talked about on here, I talked to a couple other people and they're like, yeah, there's people that are telling that, like Trump believes based on a couple people that are talking to him, that he could make a regime change within a couple weeks of this place and it would be over and it'd be like the bow tie on his legacy. He'd be the guy that took down the Iranian regime. The reality is you are looking at invading a place that we already laid out, has a lot of people. It is geographically very, very protected in many ways. You're now fighting on their territory, which can actually have the opposite effect of some people who don't even like the regime now being like, you know what? Fuck it, we're being attacked. And they also didn't seem to have like, a plan for what to do once it started. Like, it was constantly like, well, we'll do this. You know what? No. And they didn't even know that the, the, the Strait of Hormuz would be basically like, held captive, even though there were a lot of intelligence sources saying it would. So first question, were you surprised at all by the Strait of Hormuz becoming an issue?
- [58:10]
A
No, we planned this on like, it was literally like, yeah, again. But it goes back to General Votel. He, they asked him this question and he literally answered. And I think it was with the national, the uae. He, he, they asked, well, how did you not anticipate this? And he kind of looks. But what are you talking. Of course we did.
- [58:25]
B
Yeah, we told him.
- [58:27]
A
And, and, and, and, and again. But again, it goes back to my previous perspective. What it, when you're planning stuff, right. How do you execute those plans? And, and it's, you cannot do an all. Like, I want air supremacy. I want the Straits of. For open at once. I want to do this. I want it like, you have, there's phases of operations on how to do things. And then that's the thing. So you have the, the threats that are existing right now would be very interesting. For example, Project Freedom gets reannounced. Like this whole, you know, Straits of Hormuz and these naval forces go through. It's also interesting that this diplomatic route. I don't disagree with you. I think the messaging specifically from the top has been all over the place. And I think that's a, that's where I think if there's a lesson learned for anybody who wants to continue, like, that's why you have to have discipline in your communications department and how you message to the American people. Because this also was a war for most of us. Majority of American people were not expecting or anticipating. Yeah. And so, so that's also a problem.
- [59:22]
B
I wonder why.
- [59:23]
A
But going back to, from a military perspective, from Iran also, like I, I was expecting a lot worse. Flat out 100. Their capabilities were robust. You can look at all they had, the numbers they were launching some of the military bases that were hit. We knew they were going to hit them. Even, even the one where they hit the E3 century, you know, the, the commanding the AWACS in Saudi Arabia. Yeah, okay, right. That, that was A significant hit. But then you hear people making these arguments, well, how did we not do this? And this and this and this again goes back to do you know before you make this analysis, are you aware of how many military installations US military forces are able to operate in the Middle east when they're bombing Iran? Do you have. Do you know you won't but do you know that number two, you also have any commander will tell you there's areas where you have to assume risk. Why do commanders exist in the military, from a platoon leader all the way to a cocom Commander Commander because their officers, they're the commander because they're the ones at certain echelon that can assume risk and make a decision with risk in mind. Right. If I'm a S2, I'm an intelligence officer and I tell my battalion commander, hey, sir, if the enemy is here, here, here, if you do this, this is could be the con. This is the risk that we're going to see me, the S2 and the S3 and we brief the commander.
- [60:37]
B
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- [61:29]
A
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B
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- [61:59]
A
Max, the commander is going to look at that and say, can I make this decision myself? Or do I have to go to higher to say, hey, I need authorities to make this decision and to assume risk. And I think that gets ignored. And so when you're talking about the strike at Princeton Air base, I destroyed the awacs, well, why do we had all our forces there? Because the priority was air superiority and air supremacy over Iran. That means you had to concentrate certain amount of forces, this refueler capability, aircraft capability in certain areas that we're going to be a target. So you try to mitigate that risk with air defense. And if you have the ability to maybe harden structures but you don't have unlimited resources, that's another thing everybody thinks, oh, we can throw everything at once, all there into. And it's like, again, that's not how reality works. And so again, I just go back to it. My, I think, how I would say this, look at the 91 Gulf War and compare it to Iran. Saddam Hussein shot down down more American aircraft and killed more American airmen and even captured American pilots than Iran did in this war. What is. So if you look at the 91 Gulf War and you look at this war, you actually, if anything, you can make the argument you've seen an improvement. The vast majority of U. S Aircraft losses in Iran were drones, MQ9 drones. Because the MQ9 drones was very interesting. The, the. I think he was, he was in the air force. I don't remember his exact position. He said, yeah, we were using the MQ9 to go over heavily utilizing them for strikes because in the end of the day, well, they're drones. If they get shot down, we're not risking our pilots. So that's what they kind of like really push that risk. And so that's why they're more likely to get shot down, but that's why they're there. Again, that's why officers in the military exist. Yeah, I want that because in the end of the day, I want to destroy this asset. I'm willing to assume that risk. So if you look this expense, right. And so if you look at it 91 to now and you look at the combat power losses, Saddam Hussein did better. Which shows that the U.S. even with a country with the most advanced ballistic missile program and Dr. Program in the Middle east, did worse than Saddam Hussein. And I think most people can't comprehend that. And they look at the civilian strikes and the Dubai airport and the, the oil refiners, Iran knows how to do that because they know that's how they're going to get the US to back Off. That's their whole point. You can make the argument the US should never have done that. I'm not. That's not. And I don't want people to look at this and say I'm an advocating this war. I'm not advocating this war. That's not what I'm saying.
- [64:16]
B
Right, you're breaking.
- [64:16]
A
I'm just saying this is. And if the president say go, go and I'm an officer, it's like, okay, we go. And then if I'm like right there, I'm like right about to win and I'm like, oh. And then the president or my, or an officer above me says stop, I stop.
- [64:29]
B
Yeah.
- [64:30]
A
That's the chain of command. And so that in the end of the day is the president, are we going to go back to war? Maybe, maybe not. Are there's going to be a diplomatic solution? Maybe, maybe not. But that's a separate conversation than here.
- [64:39]
B
Well, not to compare apples to ice cream here because they are entirely different. Different scenarios. That said, when you look at the 28 minute war in Venezuela, which was a brilliantly executed mission, no doubt.
- [64:54]
A
What.
- [64:55]
B
Regardless of whether you think they should have gone in there or not, like they executed it perfectly. That relied heavily on artificial intelligence to basically like war Planet and then execute it. And you know, again, totally different. But what do you know anything about like what the setup is for, you know, the utilization of AI on the battlefield in Iran and where maybe that's gone wrong in places where they thought it was going to go. Right.
- [65:20]
A
I just, I go back to like from, from, I mean, I'll get to the AI piece in a second. But it's two different objectives. Right. What Trump, what the US did in against Maduro was a very specific capture leader. Pull him out. In Iran. It wasn't, it was, it wasn't just the strike that killed Khamini, the supreme leader. Like it wasn't just a one and done. It was a dedicated campaign of absolute degradation of Iranian military cap, the navy, the air force, the ballistic missile force, the production capabilities in the nuclear facilities and even some of the leadership in ground forces. And besieged like the Israelis did a lot more of that. Right. They led a lot more of that aspect. Now you're getting the reports. Are they reconstitute. Take a step back, be very cautious. When you read, when you read articles that said leaked intelligence says this and here's the reason why. Sure. But it's not because they're lying. I don't, I don't want to. I don't want to. I don't like throwing fake news. I don't like. I think that's, that's disingenuous and not fake fair for reporters who are just trying to do their job in the situation they're at. What I would tell people is multiple things. One, did they have access to the full intelligence report or did people tell them? And then when people tell them, the question is, okay, the intelligence report can say this, but there's other things that are very important. For example, what's the mythology? What's the scope of the intelligence report? So what were they, what were they trying to analyze? The methods they try to achieve that, the sources they used. And more important, the confidence level. Level. Was it a low media or high confidence level that matters? I as an intelligence official could say you, let's say you're my commander, sir, we have a single source human report indicating that there's going to be an ID attack at this location at this time. That's an analysis. But my confidence level. But sir, it's low confidence because it's one person. Now let's say that person has a five year history of excellent reporting, having 99 success rate in his intelligence. Oh, I mean maybe I can say, well, maybe I'm going to say medium based on standards that we have or maybe that triggers a high confidence because he's such a reliable source. Now let's say I got a single source report and then I have intercepts of. That's again, that's the confidence level. And I think that's why a lot of times the news organization and you might then see the CENTCOM commander when they grill him in an open, you know, Congressman plays against like you're a congressman, you know what you're doing. You can go to a behind the scenes means, you know what's going on. They brief you, you have a scif. Okay, like some of these is like I got it, but it's all political. I got it. You know, but in an incline. And you see the, you know, the general there and he's like. Or the admiral's like, I can't say this here. You know, I can't. He just said, well I disagree. And we'll talk about that behind a classified setting. But that's where you kind of have these disagreements, right? That that kind of go on because I think some of that the media doesn't necessarily capture either because they don't want to. They think it over complicates or they don't understand. And one of those is for example, like the CIA. We can go to this later. The CNN report of like the CIA assassination against cartel members in Mexico. I I don't know if you saw that from cnn. Cnn, CNN reported and then New York Times subsequently later but differently said that there was plans that the CIA ground branch had plans to kind of conduct assassinations inside of Mexico against cartel members. Not an intelligent report, assassinate them and
- [68:25]
B
they work with them.
- [68:27]
A
So I think some of these again issues. But yeah, going like that's you have. Because now the conversation when the military strikes happened against Iran, it was very different than Venezuela. Yeah, that's the one I have issues with this report we can go into.
- [68:43]
B
But yeah, but let's break it down since we're on it. So what this was from May 12, 2026. So this is a good real life example. What were the things that stood out to you here? It says, see by the way, I just want to read the headline Ciscalate Secret war on Cartels with Deadly operations inside Mexico.
- [68:58]
A
Yeah. So number one, okay, so that video is from a, A, a car that was driving this happened near Mexico City and recorded the back end of that explosion. And so in that car we, I remember seeing this and like when it first came out it was like that the guy who they killed, his name is El. Right? Be P I Y I N be and you can actually probably find the video of that like of that explosion where they killed him. I don't know if you're going to get flagged for doing that but that, that, that's like won't put it on
- [69:29]
B
the screen but you can.
- [69:30]
A
Yeah, but I mean it's like all over X, Twitter, social media, like it's easily found.
- [69:34]
B
Yeah, let's, let's, let's watch that in here.
- [69:38]
A
So first of all, so he, so he, like, he wasn't like, I mean you can make the argument maybe he was mid level and I mean that's kind of like a stretch in many aspects. Oh, okay. I didn't even know who he was until after the fact. And the only reason why I knew who he was is because later accounts identified him working for another guy. Who's Elliot is Quatro Puno four four by one, right. Or menu. He's basic, he's a, he's a lieutenant, a top lieutenant of the Maito Flacos in Caloa. Okay. The area where that guy is based out of. Last year there was a major drug bust there where they seized multiple meth labs that were producing like tons of methamphetamines. Like. Like an excessive amount of methamphetamines. So that's the one. I mean, I think it should be fine, but.
- [70:23]
B
Yeah, well, we'll leave it off there just in case. YouTube's been really tough, but that.
- [70:28]
A
Yeah, that's the one. And so the art. Yeah, that's it. Because they. The argument is they put the explosive devices in the car and. And it detonated and killed them. And so when it first happened.
- [70:39]
B
Firework.
- [70:40]
A
When it first happened, we were all like, was this. I mean, we all assumed it was. It had to be those chapitos. Those.
- [70:47]
B
Right, right.
- [70:47]
A
Like those are the only ones. And then CNN just came out and said, oh, no, it was actually the US CIA. And it was like, okay, why would the. And then subsequently after that, there's a New York Times report that said, well, it wasn't a CIA unilateral operation done by ground branch. It was a CIA coordinated operation with the Mexicans and the Mexican intelligence were the one who killed. Well, I don't even think they identified who was the one who did it, but they just said the Mexicans did. Did it. It's just the CIA gave the intelligence. Okay, still, why? The. The only. The only logical explanation I can think of is you want to cause mass paranoia within the organization, so you start doing assassinations. They're thinking there's somebody inside or there's somebody with my rivals working, and they. They managed to penetrate my organization, they're killing my guys off. So now you cause mass paranoia and mass confusion, and then that causes tensions within the organization. I talk to sources from this. This. They said this like they don't believe it at all. And then what kind of sources are
- [71:48]
B
you talking with for that? Without revealing who they are?
- [71:51]
A
The. I would just say. Let me, Let me, Let me answer this. If this were true. If this were true, you would have seen the Mexican government run, like, wild on this story. Story. Because before this.
- [72:12]
B
I agree.
- [72:13]
A
Before this, two CIA officers died in a car accident in Chihuahua. And the Mexican president, by the way, lied through her teeth saying, oh, we didn't know. Right. So these officers, what happened was they. They were. They helped the Chihuahua State Police do a drug raid that seized a couple of drug labs in Chihuahua. Right. I think it was Luis Chaparro then said that the reason why the CIA was involved because they had the tech to help find these drug labs. Okay. But then the federal government, we didn't know CIA was operating in Chihuahua with the Chihuahua State Police. Okay. The CIA is not risking an extensive Extensive intelligence cooperation and agreement between the US And Mexico because of a drug lab. Sorry to the people. No, they're not. They're not going to do that. Two if they're working with the Chihuahua State Police the federal government is going to be made aware of that and if anything are also actively cooperating.
- [73:07]
B
Separating.
- [73:08]
A
But why did Claudia Sheinbaum say oh, we weren't aware the governor of Chihuahua belongs to a rival political party that then she can use as a political weapon against her for upcoming elections and say because that's not morena political party. Right. So that's why she said that. And I'm my argument is by the way the head of security for Mexico like the like what would be equivalent to the Department of Homeland Security for Mexico or his name is Omar Harut. He is very well liked in the U S I mean extremely well liked. Bipartisan support gets a lot of praises. He went on Newsmax very interestingly to do his interview with the U S media and you actually know why he wanted to get into, you know, he wants to get in the. He wants to get in the conservative in the Trump's ear. Omar Carfuch is a very powerful figure within Mexico and has done a lot to coordinate with the United States. There's no universe where the CIA would have done an operation in Mexico against, you know, unilaterally in Chihuahua. It just doesn't make any sense. It just doesn't. So then using that as an example, you're telling me that the CNN drops is a couple of weeks later or not even a couple of weeks, like a week later that their union. What did the Mexican government say? Omar, shortly after this article was published blasted CNN's reporting, said this is fundamentally false. And then when the New York Times reported well it was the Mexican the US Intelligence support, but it was done by the Mexicans. Claudia Sheinbaum literally on her morning press briefing said oh this is fantasyland. No, the Mexicans didn't kill was a universal condemnation not of the US Actions but of the reporting. And so that's why I have a lot of doubts on this report and because again Elbighin, I mean he was maybe you know that he was cuatro poruno which is myito flaco and there were some drug labs last year. But, but like you know, it just. It's not a major figure. If you would have told me for example El panu So let me backtrack this all had. There was a string of very interesting assassinations that happened in 2025 early 2026, with this one kind of being the one. But in December 2025, there was two assassinations that really picked my interest that were specifically against those chapitos, the rivals of Theos. It was El Panu who was the head of security. It was Elano, head of security, and then a guy named the Alchemist. The Alchemist. The Alchemist, yes. So he was a. He was killed in Kulakan. He was suspected to be involved in a lot of the drug labs, like manufacturing, all that. There was two assassinations, but the big one was Elpano. El Panu was the head of security. He took over after El Peris. El Perris was the head of security because he took after. After El Nini. So Perez was killed by Mexican special forces. El Nini was captured by Mexican special forces. Right. So, like, the head of security of Losapitos continues to go down, like, killed. I mean, captured, killed. And then El Banu, he was in Mexico City and just randomly assassinated in Mexico City.
- [76:05]
B
Like, how did they still have power? They've been in this whole, like, civil war. Their leader's been gone now for a while. The Sons have had all the problems and have been extradited to the US and now, like, you have the Mexican government continually taking out their head of security. Like, how are they still functioning?
- [76:22]
A
You know, it's funny, I literally, yesterday was on with Katarina on her dispatch on Ironclad. We literally had the whole episode was talk, talking about this.
- [76:28]
B
Well, let's do it.
- [76:34]
A
I would say. I think. I think don't. It's very interesting to your point, like how. Right. Let's say again, like we did with Iran. Let's go back in time. When I started my account. Let's say it's 2023.
- [76:47]
B
Allegedly.
- [76:48]
A
Right? Yeah. You can look at my social Twitter.
- [76:52]
B
You were like, Kevin Durant. You had them partners, boy. You were sitting back there and intel like, yes, sir. Yo, you ain't going to believe this. Twitter.
- [77:02]
A
So let's say it's. It's 2023. And you would have told me that in 2026, Mayo Zamba would have been captured by the U.S. is in U.S. federal custody, and Menel was killed. El Cardinero was captured.
- [77:21]
B
I miss him. He was awesome.
- [77:23]
A
And the only one remaining out of those guys is Ivan Archivaldo. I'm like, you're out of your goddamn mind. If anything, I would have. If Polymarker was a thing, I would have bet if Garner was gone, putting
- [77:34]
B
aside El Mencho or not El Mencho. Oh, Mayo. Yeah, for a second. Because there's a reason I want to put him aside specifically. Why were the other ones so. So surprising? I agree they're definitely surprising in any scenario in 2023. But, like, they do have huge targets on their back.
- [77:50]
A
Right. But they were also. I mean, but there is a kind of a fundamental shift. The. In this aspect, this conversation was this idea of this. That they were viewed as untouchable. Maybe not a cardo, maybe not a card. Elemental. Yeah, I mean, we saw. Why. I have my own theories about that, by the way, about the other show. Yeah. That I don't. I. I think there's a. There was a little in that. In a good way, in a different
- [78:13]
B
way, in a good way.
- [78:13]
A
And I. I think that.
- [78:15]
B
Oh, this is fun.
- [78:16]
A
I. Let me, Let me get to the Yvon crowd and I'll get. I promise I'll jump into the. That.
- [78:20]
B
I just want to know what they did to my man Il hard.
- [78:23]
A
Well, they captured. Which was very interesting about. There was no narco blockades. What do you mean? Okay, so generally when they capture cartel leader, what do you see? Like in Mento, right. What happened? Mexico goes to.
- [78:34]
B
Right.
- [78:34]
A
But not, not necessarily retaliation, but, like, they try to stop it. So how do they stop it? They, like, do the narco blockades. They burn businesses, they shoot places up. Right. Like, they did that with Guzman twice, you see, every time, time. Oh, there's narco. Because they get somebody. The fact that Cardo got captured and there was like, there was no narco blockades, no burning of vehicles, nothing. It was just like Omar Kar came out. Yeah, we got a Cardo.
- [79:00]
B
Sounds a little weird.
- [79:01]
A
What the.
- [79:01]
B
Yeah, what's happening there?
- [79:02]
A
Like, they must have. And, and, and from the report, like, no, his security tried to, like, get him out, but, like, nothing. Like what he wasn't able to. Did they find a way to cut him off communication wise? And he wasn't able to communicate with anybody to do that. And so by the time they announced it, it's too late. Late. Right. Because again, outside of El Mental, this is an important data point. When we're talking about narco blockades outside of El Mental, people think, oh, they do this for retaliation. And that's not necessarily true. The reason why they do narco blockades is not to retaliate except. And Mental. It's to stop the person from being captured or if he manages to get captured, force the Mexican government to release them because of the violence. But if that target then gets captured and then gets sent over To Mexico City. City. At that point, it makes no sense to continue the narco blockades because now what they're going to try to do is go through the courts to either get his case thrown out or at least stop any extradition by a judge or. Yeah, and we've seen that happen. We've seen that happen all the time.
- [79:58]
B
Judge heads off, too.
- [79:59]
A
And so that, that is. That is when they do it. Right. So the fact that there was no narco plug, it is very, very, very, very interesting. But I don't know if it's one of those situations. Maybe we're reading too much into it and there's just information we like. Maybe they cut off his communications or it was really. He was caught by surprise. There might be other detail, but that. That was like, oh, Mar just announced it. Whoa. Now, he could have just announced it to also say, oh, see cartel members. Too late. You can't do anything. We already got him. So don't do the narco blood case because it makes no sense. Right, but again, but going back to Ivan Aldo, I mean, it's. To your point, like, who's. Who does he have left? Let's look at the factions, right? For example, Lo Yukos, one of the key factions.
- [80:40]
B
Can we pull up, Yvonne?
- [80:42]
A
But yeah, so like, for example, you look there. There's a term for all the chapitos who switch side to the Mayos. They're called those volteados.
- [80:50]
B
Los Cortes volteados.
- [80:54]
A
Yeah. The Voltaire is like the terminal. No, no, like. Like the guys who are the betrayers, in a way. The guys who switch sides, who switch teams.
- [81:01]
B
Rats.
- [81:02]
A
Right. So that's how those chapitos call them.
- [81:04]
B
Them.
- [81:04]
A
They say we're fighting against Chapu Sidro, which is not. Not to be confused with Chapo. Chapu Sidro is the Mesa Flores Organization. The Guava Cartel, former blo were fighting against Los Mayos. Mao Flo.
- [81:15]
B
Now, wait, Plo.
- [81:18]
A
Yes. So the Betan Levine organization used to be part of the Caloa Cartel, and then they split off. Huge violence. I was like, you know, and then. So he was kind of one of the last. Not, not last, but he's like one of the more powerful ones of former BO and. And people.
- [81:35]
B
Archibalda.
- [81:36]
A
Sorry. The, like, if you look at how the. The Treasury Department, the Justice Department, the State Department, they called like guys who are blos. They say, oh, Sinaloa Cartel. It's like, no, that's not true. They're not. But, you know, they don't. It's the Justice Department. They don't give a. Yeah, they're gonna be like, well, he was once Sinalo, always Sinaloa. Like, they're all Mexican. But yeah, that's Ivan, right?
- [81:57]
B
Oh, he looks like a Bond villain.
- [81:59]
A
So what's very interesting about Ivan, though, I think people underestimated him a lot. Right? And, and, and, and. But I would say so Lo Chapitos, right? There's four remaining, right? There was four originally. I'm sorry? There was four originally. So Ivana, Chival Jesus are the two that are out. And then you have O Guzman and Hai Guzman.
- [82:16]
B
Then those are the.
- [82:17]
A
Then those are the. The other. Those are the sons that are in the US And I, the ones that are here. Okay. Is the undisputed leader, Los Chapitos. And the thing is, and I told this in Katarina, shows, like, he has absolute loyalty with his members. Like. Like, if you look at Chapito propaganda and social media pages and messaging page, they love this man to death.
- [82:37]
B
Why?
- [82:39]
A
I think he became the heir of El Chapo. And El Chapo had this gravitas, right? This, this image that, interestingly enough, Ivan was able to capture that very powerful. Right, exactly. You know who doesn't have it, though? Jesus Alfredo. If you want to. I don't know if you can look up Jesus Alfredo. So it's Jesus after the same Guzman Salazar. Jesus Alfredo is like the least charismatic human being I've ever. No, it's. So. It's not. It's. It's. Yeah, the. The one with that red, the white. That. That's like. His late is more accurate. That's it. That's. That's.
- [83:14]
B
This guy don't have Riz.
- [83:15]
A
No, no, no, man.
- [83:17]
B
Like, how do you become a drug lord if you don't have.
- [83:20]
A
I find it more likely that this man is going to defect and never take over.
- [83:24]
B
Los Chapitos is going to defect to the US in. What was the second part of that then?
- [83:29]
A
Take over Lop. Okay. I thought you said something which is very interesting because now there's a lot of reporting that Ivan is in negotiations with the US to turn himself in.
- [83:37]
B
Oh, that's interesting.
- [83:38]
A
That's very interesting because they already got
- [83:40]
B
a lot of the chat post in.
- [83:41]
A
That's. That's. Look at the factions. Like, the only key. Like, if you look like, okay, they have. I'm just going to throw an in. So don't like Los Cascos. Okay, sure, they're very small, kind of like, all right. But not. The biggest one they have maybe left is a group, again, named Renee Renee Zero, Zero. Dude, that guy, hard name, Rene. Re a R E N E 00.
- [84:05]
B
Bad guy, great name.
- [84:07]
A
So that dude is like, I don't know how many times he switched sides. He's like the least reliable person you can imagine. You know, like the whole mafia honor. Like, that guy doesn't believe Michael.
- [84:18]
B
He's Michael Cohen.
- [84:19]
A
He doesn't. I. Perfect, perfect, perfect. That is. That is the example I was looking for. They the amount of videos that the Chapito social media pages release on fighters belonging to Rene fighting in Mexico, in Sinaloa. They think, okay, so that's all you guys have left them in those cascos. But the cascos are very interesting. And then under the cascos, I think they're called Forces speciales. So the 81st Special Forces. I think that's their full name. What is this? Oh, okay. No, no, put like Z, like the actual number, not like zero. Like zero, zero number.
- [84:53]
B
Got it.
- [84:53]
A
So zero, zero. Yeah. And let's see.
- [84:55]
B
And you want it on Twitter.
- [84:57]
A
Yeah. So for example, that. What's the chicken? Okay, so that.
- [85:00]
B
Is that Los Pollos Locos?
- [85:02]
A
No, that's. That's Elgayo, the CJNG symbol. Oh, so, okay, so the pizza. Los chapitos chapiza. So they're pizza. And then they had that. So that. That is an image you.
- [85:14]
B
Did we show that. Is that gonna get us?
- [85:16]
A
I don't think so. I mean. I mean, it's a car on fire.
- [85:19]
B
A little bit of fire.
- [85:21]
A
Come on.
- [85:22]
B
They got fire in Pakistan.
- [85:24]
A
So. So that. That image is an AI generated image that shortly when there was rumors before the CGNG Chapito alliance was officially announced, you started to see some narco message in some social media channels reporting that there was an alliance that was the one that they. That, you know, AI generated. They probably went to Chachi Beats like, give me a rooster with the pizza. And then that's what they called it for you. And that's the image that they use. So within that, it's Chapito, CG and G. And in those chapitos, really right now it's like the main one of Rene, which is these guys. Like, these are the guys, right? Like, that's them shooting it up. Right?
- [86:00]
B
Nice.
- [86:01]
A
And. But it's like, I mean, I. I would have to look at the exact comment, but I'm pretty certain that's like the one. But it's like, really? That's your guy? The guy who switched side 50 million times. That's who you're reliant on and that's. And what's actually very interesting, last week there were rumors and some I've talked to some other cartel observer accounts really reliable that are like adamant like. No, no. Rene entered into a ceasefire with Los Mayos and because he was, he was fighting a lot in Southern Caloa and that he entered into a ceasefire with L. What's interesting of that, if that's the case, that's the Miles didn't enter into a ceasefire with all Los Chapitos or all of Caloa just with him. So although Rene is still Chapito, he's not going to go above if this ceasefire is true. He's kind of been like, all right, Ivon, you're. You're gonna have to fight them on the north on your own. I'm done fighting. Right. And so again, it goes back to what is. Who does Yvonne have left? And that's a problem. And I think that's why the reporting that he's considering turning himself in is gaining traction. I think the Los Angeles Time also reported on that, which is very interesting. Which again wouldn't be surprising. I can tell you right now. Yvonne has been almost captured so many times. He's like his father. He's really good at escaping. Very, very effective. But going back to your question about why he wasn't easy. He was like a low. Of all the leaders years, he was like the low hanging fruit compared to. When mentioned compared to in Mayo. Now in Mayo, you're right, was a unilateral U.S. operation. So you can't.
- [87:21]
B
Yeah,
- [87:24]
A
it was done by the Mexicans. Let me get this clear. But there was a very interesting report from Reforma that indicated that was not informed about the operation to get El Mencho until was well underway.
- [87:38]
B
Kept her in the dark.
- [87:40]
A
And I believe it.
- [87:41]
B
Why do you believe that one?
- [87:46]
A
Because I think they're, I think, I think the, I think the. How these operations generally work is it's do not underestimate or undervalue, underappreciate the power that the US have in what is called Vetted units in Mexico. Vetted Units unit. So basically let's say like there's a great Reuters report actually that lays it out from the CIA vetted unit in Mexico. Right. That, that they. It's great. Read it. It's phenomenal. And basically once you read that you, what you understand is so like say the CIA, the military, FBI, DEA, HSI. Actually if you look at HSI's like Twitter handle, you put like vetted unit and search, they'll say Mexico sees this. This is. And it's through a vetted unit. Like they will. They like throw that all the time. How these vetted units work is they're basically, you know, vetted by the US Trained to quit script paid all the. Actually, this is the one, right? Oh, the Pernicious Propaganda. By the way, great account. Follow them. Love them.
- [88:45]
B
Wait, I haven't seen that one before.
- [88:46]
A
So these are. Remember when I said osint? Yeah, he. They are an OSINT account. They are.
- [88:51]
B
Notice guy.
- [88:52]
A
We. We talked. It's actually three.
- [88:54]
B
Oh, it's three.
- [88:55]
A
It's three.
- [88:55]
B
Do you know them personally?
- [88:57]
A
No. Most of the people in cartel land, I don't know personally. We all chat regularly, but no.
- [89:01]
B
So the guy's got to do like a cartel meetup or something.
- [89:03]
A
Well, actually, we've had. Had a. On our podcast, one of the team members, Joe from Pernicious Propaganda has joined our. Our. Our podcast Our Choice.
- [89:12]
B
Located down there.
- [89:13]
A
No, no, no, no. I don't believe so. I don't know. But if you like. If you. So you. Sorry. Just quickly like the vetted units, like that's the thing that I was trying to focus on. But when I was going to Oent the reason why he's a believe true believer because he does geol. I hate doing geolocations, but like he does like actual like here's a video. So I'm going to geolocate this in the background and all that. And so then I'm a manager of Geoconfirmed Cartel Map. So geo confirmed.
- [89:38]
B
Cartel Map.
- [89:39]
A
Yeah. So Geoconfirmed is another great ocean tool where it's like they have all the geolocations. So Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Israel, Syria, you name it, there's a cartel one. And so you can. They have all these videos and images where if it's geolocatable and you geolocated with evidence, they have it on a map with the date and everything. And so you can kind of.
- [89:56]
B
Oh, that's cool. So deep. This is basically like. This is like so good during the situation. And he's the one creating. Creating the situation.
- [90:03]
A
So go to Carto. Scroll. So on the left side you see where it says cartel map. Yeah, scroll down. I think you went up. There we go. Click on Cartel Map. And now on. Okay, so. So on the bottom you see the bar? I haven't updated it. Sorry. Geo confirmed. I'm really sorry. I will update it soon. Get. Grab the. The left purple and go all the way to the left. All the way. All the way. All the way. All the way.
- [90:23]
B
Yo.
- [90:24]
A
And now zoom out.
- [90:25]
B
What the.
- [90:27]
A
So this is. So these are all the events and they're color coded based on the cartel
- [90:32]
B
or the government doing this.
- [90:33]
A
No, I'm. I. No, no. Pernicious propaganda does 99.
- [90:36]
B
I'm just doing this.
- [90:37]
A
Yeah. I'm just. The guy says approved and I just added into the system like that looks good. Good guys added. So like absolutely godlike work. Let me show you another one about O said on. On. If I may. Let me. I'm gonna give you the.
- [90:53]
B
Do whatever you want.
- [90:54]
A
Let me. Let me show. Let me give you another one. One. So the other account look up H E A R S T. You know what the best part I was that the. The bb. The third one. That one.
- [91:10]
B
Okay, wait, is this another one?
- [91:11]
A
That. Another great cartel account inputs to this. No, no. She does bios that are insane. Like she just scroll down. I'm not even like. Like scroll down like that. Like that.
- [91:23]
B
Oh, this is. Bro, this is what I need in my life. Cuz this is actually the funny part about doing the cartel content because it's always like Spanish words and other stuff. Every time I have in one of you guys after like two, three months, I'm like. I'm a blank slate again. Wait, which one is which?
- [91:38]
A
Now this whole. So she does Spanish and English. She does Spanish. Her website. She actually has a website. It's on her link like go. If you want to go back, go to her. It's a narco chronicles. And click on one of these guys.
- [91:52]
B
Oh, she's got like the flow chart. Yeah.
- [91:54]
A
Oh, and she had. So one of her. I love one of her flowchart from October. She has all of Sinaloa and all the Chapitos and Mayo's Plaza bosses identify. She actually she got DCMA by an account who was trying to take. You know, she's influential because accounts in Mexico were trying to DCMA her work and saying she didn't have. Because she. She. They were like, oh, she didn't have copyright. Copyright.
- [92:18]
B
Copyright for what?
- [92:19]
A
For her work to put up a criminal on Twitter. On Twitter. Because it would. So Twitter. Twitter would take her down all the time. So. Oh, we. Yeah. Put up a biography because the images. These images, you see the black and that. You see that? That's. And that's her. For if anybody sees that that's her format. She deserves the credit. And people steal it. Like that's crazy. So she's another great account. So pernicious propaganda. Geo confirmed cartel.
- [92:47]
B
Are we following these accounts, Steve? I want to make sure we.
- [92:50]
A
And then so in general, Borderland Beat is a phenomenal news organization. I know a lot of the reporters. Not just Borderland beach, just not general. Sorry. Borderland Beat. I. I hope they, they Borderland Beats. Yeah, these, these guys are like really great reporters. I talked to a lot of them. So like Waso, Soul, Brandido, itzel, Ivan. So AIC03, that's another one. That's a phenomenal one. There's another one that. Oh my God. I'm like, hold on, give me a second. Cruise. Cruise has another great one. He has a great telegram channel as well with a lot of sources and information. Cruz is really good.
- [93:33]
B
This is huge because this is actually a huge problem with this space because it's so dangerous down there and because
- [93:40]
A
obviously look this way one up and I'm going to show you why. So you pull it up and I'll. I'm going to put. You got to click on this map.
- [93:47]
B
Right? But because like they're so wild, wild west to the wild wild west end degree down there. Finding people who actually know what the is going on is so difficult. So this is great.
- [93:59]
A
Okay, so click on the Google map link. Yeah. So now do me a favor, go on the left and just click the crimes to the third one. Click like unclick like that. And now zoom in. So this is the most accurate cartel territorial control map you will ever find.
- [94:21]
B
What makes it so accurate?
- [94:23]
A
Because this. So you remember what the geoconfirmed I showed you?
- [94:25]
B
Yeah.
- [94:26]
A
And then he talks to other accounts and people and then based on all that he literally goes into Google map and updates his regular saying who, where's the territories that they control. So the colors are all different cartel territorial controls. So for example, that see red is cjng. That right there is cjng. And then the lines denud like all the alliances and conflicts that they, they have. Whoa. So you can like, so you can. So for example, go to when we were talking about Renee. So funny. You know how I found. So I found him. I kid you not, on Reddit, he's like, hey, I'm making this. What do you guys think? Dude, I was just like, what in the. Dude, you're amazing. I need you on X like now. Please, please come to X. I am begging you. And I will reach tweak the out of you and endorse you because do you know how hard this is? Like he goes in with based on pernicious propaganda. Geocom, the other one who does a lot of great work is Halipon. Halipon is another great j a l no h a l I p and I think it's a 0n h one. He also does a lot of geoconfirmed and geolocation as well. But then they go there and then they update all this and then if you click, you can click on any of these and they'll show you like the different factions within and the readings region. Like so like see all there in the lab mess.
- [95:43]
B
Guadalajara is. Oh my God.
- [95:46]
A
So like, like so when I first created my account, if you were to ask me what my end goal was, was that like a lot of these things you're seeing now, I wanted a geoconfirmed cartel map. Somebody who had a live map like this. You know, Hearst just been kicking ass way before I existed. And she does an amazing like. And it's like. And it's now it's like, okay, we got to get that them the. The what they deserve like the credit they deserve because I know for a fact that Scalpon, another great cartel account. Cruz is another one. AVA aic. Like there's so many that like that they do so much great work. And these are just. A lot of them are more kind of like in some. You know, a lot of them are bilingual, obviously English and Spanish. But a lot of these are more kind of the English things. But like that's what he does, right? Like pernicious propaganda. Was talking about the geoconfirming location.
- [96:32]
B
Look, he's got the funeral of guys who were in the El Men show, right? Raid.
- [96:36]
A
So like that. So, so, so that's kind of the network, right? It's like, okay, let's find the videos, let's post them then people. Then, then they'll go, okay, let's. You'll confirm it and my brother can update his map. You know, Hearst can be like, okay, who's who in the zoo and who's the new leaders and who's. And they think that's just. And again, we don't get paid to do this, right? None of them do. I wish they would, but you know what? Hey Elon, let's pay the guys that. That freaking say trans people are going to do mass shootings 247 or like a. Oh, let me have my camera and do this for a second and say I'm a reporter because of that and you're going to tell me the knowledge that you get from this and they get no credit and people steal their. All the time. And even sometimes news organizations, some of them have standards and integrity, others don't. They just straight up a news organization
- [97:28]
B
without standards and integrity.
- [97:29]
A
Some of them do.
- [97:30]
B
It's not. I'm offended at.
- [97:31]
A
Some of them do on. And there's other accounts. For example, I do a lot of the, the. The. There's. I actually have a lot of the military aircraft observers like the true ones have been doing it for decades. There's a lot of great military aircraft observer and they're keep. Because they track Mexican flights, US flights, South America because. And what's good about them is they know what normal is and what isn't. Because I can grab one image of a on flight radar, show it to you and you'd be like oh my God, we're gonna bomb Iran tomorrow, bomb Mexico tomorrow because of this weird one thing. It's like no, that actually that one thing has happened 200 times already. Like that's normal. Like and that's why. And that's where I think the OSINT now I think people can understand my passion for Oent because that it's insane. It's an insane amount of work and dedication that people take time out of their days to do for no monetary benefit whatsoever rather than just inform the people. Because then based on that I can tell you like Rene in Southern Sinalo, right. That, that he stopped. Now Chapitos have problems in the, in the north and so now he has to rely more on Los Guanos, which is the brother of El Chapo del Guano who's fighting Chapu Isidro, one of the faction called El Musico under Chapu Isidro. Right.
- [98:46]
B
Can we pull up the Chapo's current war on that map?
- [98:48]
A
Yeah, so let's do it.
- [98:50]
B
That's actually really hard.
- [98:51]
A
I mean if you want. I mean I can, I don't know if I can stand up there and is there an ability?
- [98:55]
B
Yeah. So we have K camera 5. What. What would be best just cuz we might be doing this a while would be like if you really got to point something out, go up there real quick and then come back. But the best is like let's just direct where it is and def will be able to direct people.
- [99:09]
A
So let's zoom out.
- [99:11]
B
Okay.
- [99:12]
A
And by the way, this is what I do. Like I've touched so many of these. Like the reason why I love him is like, you know how easy I have like a small YouTube channel like 8000 but I just down below and all. And all I do is I get his map and then I talk about people's like this is what it means. So you. Because that's. Yeah, what else do I need?
- [99:29]
B
What else do you need?
- [99:29]
A
What else do you need? So go.
- [99:32]
B
I wonder if someone like at Langley, well, I mean, they're in on it, but you know, somewhere else that actually wants to stop the cartels, they're just like looking at this like, why don't you job?
- [99:39]
A
So, so I would, you know, what's the beauty of OSINT though? Here's the beauty. Because I'm somebody who's been in the intel, right? I've been on both sides. Let's say this is. I gotta, it frustrated me to shit. Specifically Iran. Hey guys, guys. Here's this amazing intelligence report that lays out everything and all the answers and everything we needed. And I look at the classification as top secret. Si, Gamma, no foreign fisa. And I'm like, all right, so how many people in our organization have access to this? 10. Okay, so what the fuck, what am I going to do with this, right? Who, like, okay, I could tell the general and then, you know, it's like, what are we doing? But what I like about osint, it's unclassified. I could share this to everybody in the world. Like that's, that's the thing where people like, why does OSA matter? Because that's the way anybody can just grab this right now and just share it.
- [100:26]
B
Well, this is where it's such a brave new world. And I'd love to be a fly on the wall in some of these like top secret rooms in governments where they're like, where I'm sure this stuff runs into interference with what they may want to do with things. It's like people out there in their bedroom can get things that were unfathomable even 15 years ago.
- [100:47]
A
And that goes back to AI. That's why we created. Because you know how much data gets pushed on a daily basis. Like, it's literally, that's why. What is AI great at? Aggregation of large data sets, right? And analyzing it like, like we have our app sit rep for everybody and it's like, that's why we have it. Because we're collecting from thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of data points constantly. And alerts get published and it's all AI summary at the title. A summary, who, what, when, where, why. A historical context and analysis all the time. Boom, boom. Because that's the future. Like as the Internet continues to grow, there's going to always be more information than you're able to like properly analyze. Especially for human. Exactly.
- [101:30]
B
Oh my God.
- [101:31]
A
And, but here's the. Here's an interest. I always do not. Do not ignore the noise. The noise is important to too.
- [101:37]
B
Oh, no, no, that's what I meant. I meant there's so many important things happening at once that the attention can be directed wherever they want it to be. That's what I mean.
- [101:47]
A
And you know what's in the cartel landscape? I. I told this and because I've been in conferences and stuff like that, this conversation, I tell them, how do I know if this one report is true? Especially like in. It's hard, you know what I mean? It's like, oh, okay. Even if I, I validated the source, I talked to sources, some of them are cartel members, some of them are people who live in the area, some are people who have access. Right now you're going into the. Is it a first, firsthand source, secondhand source, or third hand source? Standard human. Anybody who's done human understand those terminology. And then source validation. But then there's another thing, which is what kind of oint in a large scale? It's. It's the aggregate. What's. Okay, is it one or two or is it dozens and a hundred that are all saying kind of an aggregate thing? And that's when you can have a better understanding. Okay. Who's winning or losing or what's going on in a situation, you know, but to your map to go there. So if you, you see the yellow, that yellow, pure yellow.
- [102:44]
B
Yep.
- [102:45]
A
Okay. So you can scroll in on there. Okay. So that. So this is Sinaloa, Right. So what's very interesting is this guy, this is the Chapo Isidro. Right. Again, not to be confused with a Chapo, although. But guava cartel, Meso Flores organization, he has an alliance with Los Mag.
- [103:03]
B
Right? Right.
- [103:04]
A
And so he's doing a lot of fighting in Northern Sinaloa. So I'm just going to stand up to point. Sorry, one second.
- [103:10]
B
You're good.
- [103:13]
A
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- [103:38]
B
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- [103:42]
A
So these two right here, specifically this. Right, so right here. All right, so that. So that is El Chapo's brother. That's the brother, yes. Like him? He, he, he's he's also very good at. I don't know what it is in the Chapo family that they're very good at escaping, like, they. They got that lockdown, like, so he
- [104:07]
B
doesn't look like he's fast.
- [104:08]
A
No, he's not. But. So Chapo Sidro, who has an alliance with Maayos, he isn't engaged in a very heavy battle right now for that region which is highlighted with.
- [104:18]
B
How big is that region?
- [104:19]
A
Very small. I mean. Yeah, actually. So which very key. You see that cluster of little emojis and symbols down there on the left? No, no, no, on the. Yeah, that one. That one right there. That's Baduato Caloa. You know why Bado is important?
- [104:33]
B
No.
- [104:34]
A
El Chapo was born there. The El Chapo, the one in the. The guy who founded.
- [104:38]
B
So this is like the Corleone.
- [104:40]
A
This is their hometown.
- [104:41]
B
Yeah.
- [104:42]
A
So can you imagine if Chapu Isidro managed to seize the town or by. By the Raguato where El Chapo was born? Which. There's a lot of indications he might already be there. But the psychological blow for the cart.
- [104:57]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [104:57]
A
You know what I mean? Actually, it's funny because in the other town is called Latuna in Sinaloa.
- [105:02]
B
Latuna.
- [105:03]
A
Latuna. Like. Like tuna?
- [105:04]
B
Like the fish.
- [105:05]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Latuna, Sinaloa as actually, there's a mansion that used to belong to El Chapo's mother. So Ivan's grandmother that has already been kind of like. We've seen videos of Chapu Cedar members already. Like, in the mansion, they actually, before drop bombs using drones. They'd, like, drop explosive devices on that. Yeah, she's dead. She's dead. But. But it was this. It's the symbol, right? The symbology of it. Like, don't discount the power of propaganda and symbology and cartel landscape. Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [105:29]
B
That's everything.
- [105:30]
A
So. So Chapu Isidro, one of his key faction he has, is called El Musico. They're fighting Geno. And one of Geno's key allies is called Los Calabasas. They actually use the pumpkin, like the Halloween pumpkin emotion emoji. Calabata's pumpkin. So that's the emoji they use. Calabasas used to belong to Chapu Cedar. And then they broke out. So within the Sinaloa cartel civil war, this is kind of one of the main battles that's going on. Right. Because we all talk about the Mayos and Los Chapitos. This is another one that I think gets Ignored a lot. And it's actually very, very key important in what's going on. So. So the purple is mayo. The Mayos. And then kind of like if you zoom out, it's kind of the same color, but like that over in Kuliakan, like a little bit south, that like cyan blue. Blue right there. Yeah. So that's chapitos, right? And you can see they have the chapitos right there. And then you zoom out now and on the southern part, that's where I'm talking about. Sorry. In the south, this is Renee, like Renee more.
- [106:27]
B
Can we zoom out a little more? So the Miles have a significantly larger region, but that, that's a lot of mountainous rolling hills and stuff. Whereas it seems like the Chipitos being towards the shore are more. More urban areas.
- [106:40]
A
Correct. That's. Yeah. Anyway, but even in some of the areas. So in the south, like Matatlan, like there's still mountainous area because if you keep on going down, if you keep on going south. Now this is Nayarit. This is Kaluska generation cartel. This is his cardineros. That right there in Nayarit. And that's Cardinero's territory that he's like, right? Yeah, that was his territory. But that's why when the alliance was announced, El Cardinero was one of the key members who sent fighters there. And it was was suspected that Ian Cardeno already had a long term, like a long personal relationship before the the alliance was announced. And that within the CJNG construct, Jardinero was the conduit for Los Chapitos. That and then through Hardino is how El Mento agreed on the alliance because specifically to go after. As you show the Mayos now in the purple, the, the within this you have in Durango, you see there Durango, the. There's the. They're loyal to the Miles, but the cartel there, you know, you can call them the Miles, but it's really Los Cabreras. And they're like, they have an absolute control, one near absolute control of Durango. The irony of the situation, or really not Durango is considered one of the safest states in Mexico. But the reason why is because there's one cartel that controls it.
- [107:58]
B
Devil you know, right?
- [107:59]
A
So even the Mexican government and the Durango government, like how much do we really want to go after the Durango? Like so. But why is Sinaloa one of the most violent states? Because now you have multiple cartels battling
- [108:07]
B
each other out because you took out the leadership. And this is the age old Question. It's a question with organized crime. It's a question with government leadership. And maybe those are the same thing. But, you know, you cut the head off the snake. Does it grow 10 heads or is the snake dead?
- [108:25]
A
That's. So that. That's kind of the. So that, you know, the kingpin strategy. Right. And I mean, it depends. It. I mean, some of it, it's. It's. So how I would answer this question is. And I said this in multiple other interviews, who are you addressing that question for, Mexico or the US
- [108:46]
B
Start with Mexico. It's their territory.
- [108:48]
A
Right. So Mexico, probably more than likely, if you kill a kingpin, pain, violence would go up. Like, not always. Not always, but that, you know, I
- [108:57]
B
think we've seen that.
- [108:58]
A
We've seen that a couple of times. So it's a good historical. So for Mexico, that's a problem, because they don't. What's Mexico's number one security concern? It's not the drugs, per se. It's security. So that's why in those. Durango, for example, there are many aspects. We don't want to want them.
- [109:10]
B
Yeah. We don't want bodies.
- [109:11]
A
We don't want bodies.
- [109:12]
B
Right.
- [109:12]
A
So let's take a step back. But from the U. S. Perspective.
- [109:14]
B
Drugs.
- [109:15]
A
Drugs. And now there could be an impact if you. And not only if you decapitate a leader, but if they start fighting each
- [109:23]
B
other, because then they're not. They're focused on fighting rather than the business, so the volume goes down.
- [109:29]
A
So who was. You know, those chapitos was one of the main pushers of fentanyl into the United States.
- [109:35]
B
Yeah, we've talked about that before.
- [109:36]
A
And so very interestingly that this. The amount of fentanyl that was seized across the border dropped shortly after the Sinaloa cartel civil war started.
- [109:44]
B
And when did the civil war officially start?
- [109:46]
A
September 2024.
- [109:48]
B
Okay. Yeah. Because there was also, we. I just had in. Ben Westoff as well, who wrote the book Fentanyl Inc. Which is probably the greatest book ever written on, like, the fentanyl crisis. He wrote it back in 2019. He's continued to work on the story over the years. And part of the reason that there's been such a drop is because there. There have been discussions with China where Xi Jinping has actually played some ball on stopping. What's the term for it? Thief. The pre. The precursors, the analogs, and the prec. Producers for fentanyl. And there's been a direct correlation with that. So maybe it's a combination of. Of Both. But there was obviously serious cooperation. Not just cooperation, business alliances between Chinese creators and cartel smugglers.
- [110:36]
A
I don't know. Are you gonna have him back anytime soon? Because there's a key individual that I think you guys should look up actually if you can for a second look up Brother Wayne Wang.
- [110:45]
B
Brother Wang.
- [110:45]
A
Brother Wang. It's another hard name right there.
- [110:49]
B
Z Dong Zhang, AKA Brother Wang.
- [110:52]
A
I mean let's see in images. I think they should have an image. He's in, he's in the US Already. Yeah. So like that guy, the. The top left. The guy on the top left. Yeah, that's him. So this guy, this guy. To your point, there's two aspects of your analyzing cartels from a. From as holistic that you need to analyze the Chinese components of it. It's the chemical precursor route. Right. And that's what Brother Wang was. And the money laundering. Right. That's the other aspect where the Chinese play OCC. Brother Wang was so influential that he had. He had no pro problem dealing with both the Caloa cartel and Halis new generation cartel. Both sides knew he was dealing with the other side and they didn't touch him. And if anything he was first captured. Captured. He was put in house arrest. And one of the cartels went up like hey, let me get you out. Come on.
- [111:40]
B
Oh, in Mexico. And they got him out.
- [111:43]
A
And they got him out.
- [111:43]
B
He's like the Michael Jordan offense.
- [111:45]
A
And then, then eventually he tried to escape, try to fly back to China and ironically they kind of like I think it was. He was in the, he flew through Russia. Russia's like, yo, this is a fake passport, dude. Now we're deporting you back to. Because he was flying from Cube, from Mexico. We went to Cuba, Cuba to Russia, Russia to China. And the Russia's like this is fake. Get the hell out of here. And then when, then when he went back to Cuba, Cuba's like, wait, you have a red notice on you from Interpol, from the Mexicans. And then that eventually they said you're out. And then they send him to the US So the U. S got him.
- [112:15]
B
Poor guy.
- [112:16]
A
But he was powerful enough to deal with both cartels and not a single one dared to touch him. And they both knew he was dealing with the other side.
- [112:23]
B
What made him so powerful?
- [112:25]
A
Because how are you going to get your chemical precursor nurses from.
- [112:27]
B
He was the only guy that could,
- [112:29]
A
I mean not the only guy, but if you, if you already have a well established relationship, you get it's a business.
- [112:33]
B
It's a business.
- [112:34]
A
It's like cocaine, man. That's right. The cartels don't fight in Colombia.
- [112:40]
B
Right.
- [112:40]
A
They don't fight in like, the, the Mexican cartels. They don't fight in Colombia.
- [112:45]
B
They fight in Mexico.
- [112:46]
A
They fight in Mexico.
- [112:47]
B
Right.
- [112:47]
A
And they, they. Maybe there's a, there's a. You can make an argument there's a proxy war in Ecuador that they.
- [112:51]
B
Oh, yeah, equity has been a little crazy.
- [112:54]
A
But in Columbia for the most part, they're like, this is where we get our cocaine. Come on. It's business. Business. And it's very interesting. Let's look at the Sinalo cartel civil war. Name me one place outside of Mexico where the Sinalo cartel civil war is going on. Because it isn't right. And what's very interesting, and this is a trend that I'm glad people are starting to pick up, it just. It took the U. S. AFRICOM commander, the commander of Africa to say this in the Senate briefing or, or I don't know if it was to the House or to the Senate, but he said, we're starting to notice Mexican cartels set up drug labs in Africa, like in South Africa, Nigeria, both Hallucinogeneration cartel and Sinaloa cartel. It's like, I mean, that has been a trend that has been going on for a very long time where, you know, you had the drug trafficking right from like cocaine and all that methamphetamines, etc, produced in Mexico or South America and then shipped overseas or now what they're doing is they're trying to produce it either even in Africa or even in Europe specifically. And so you're seeing an increase of drug labs being seized outside of South America to Mexico because they, it's some. And so what they'll do is they'll recruit a lot of like, chemical students in Mexico after they graduate. The cartel say, hey, we'll pay you big bucks. Bucks. Come with, come, come help us make drug labs in South Africa, which recently had a major drug lab boss that the AFRICOM commander said that the US Is able to pass intelligence. Actually, you know, we're talking about fentanyl being dropped. We're getting flooded by cocaine like insane. Like it is, like in America, the world, but especially in America.
- [114:14]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [114:14]
A
Like to the point where the price of cocaine is dropping from a wholesale perspective.
- [114:18]
B
Yeah.
- [114:18]
A
And so this month we had what is possibly the largest cocaine seizure in history. History. Off the coast of Spain, around 30 to 40 tons of cocaine was shipped.
- [114:30]
B
30 to 40 tons, that's enough for the club.
- [114:34]
A
That off the coast of Africa on a boat. Yeah, the Spanish up right now. This was very recently like May 1st. I think it was a. Yeah, it was May 1st.
- [114:45]
B
Right. May 26th or May 2026. Record breaking 30 ton seizure. In early May 2020 26th, Spanish police carried out the largest cocaine bus in European history. Intercepting a ship carrying 30 tons of cocaine. The Comoros flagged freighter the Arconian was intercepted by the guardia Seville between May 1 and May 4, 2026. The ship was stopped in international waters off the coast of Western Sahara near the Canary Islands while traveling from Sierra Leone to Lydia, Libya. The hard the hall was valued at over 812 million euros or $956 million. All 23 crew members were arrested, including 17 Filipinos and six nationals from the Netherlands and Suriname. The drugs were packed in 1279 bundles. Authorities also discovered firearms and ammunition on board. You do have to protect your shipment obviously, but that's, that's a. Woo.
- [115:46]
A
So we're losing the cocaine. And I mean the, I mean you can look at like South America, all the cocaine trade and everything that happened. Like it's just like the amount of record seizures is like oh my God. And the argument that so the. And so man I can. Man, I would love this mar. Like the cocaine, fentanyl, I would even marijuana. Like that whole drug piece is like in a very, I think interesting dynamic from a drug trade because it goes back to the U.S. that's what we're concerned about. And the kind of the violence because those cabreras in that map of Durango, that purple map right there, they, they control. They have huge meth labs in Durango. Like enormous amount of meth is produced in Durango and then smuggled. And so can you zoom out for the U.S. yeah, to the U.S. if you zoom out. Okay, so you see that black map? That black area?
- [116:33]
B
Yeah. Right.
- [116:34]
A
Okay, so that's cdn. That's the Northeast cartel.
- [116:39]
B
Why do they have like a straight line?
- [116:41]
A
Okay, so okay, so that's the Monterey to Eagle Pass. And then a lot of that is the human smuggling because CDN is one of the this. So okay, I think a lot of people like when we're talking about human smuggling in the, in Mexico to the US People automatically assume it's all cartels. It's like a lot of it is more like family or local criminal networks that. That then pay a fee to the cartel.
- [117:03]
B
Stopped.
- [117:03]
A
Yeah. To. But, but CDN is one of the cartels that's like no, no, they're actively involved in human smuggling, much more so than others. And that line, because mon, they get a lot of the migrants and then they push it up to Eagle Pass. But what I was getting at that purple and black, right? So Mayo and CDN have an alliance, a business alliance. And there's even more suspicions that they're also an alliance fighting against those Chapos in Caloa. The CDN has send members down to Lo Chapitos to fight. But a lot of the meth that is produced in Durango and a lot of the drugs is produced in Durango, then gets pushed to cdn who's then smuggles into the US because cdn, they're what I would call like a border cartel. They don't control the drug distribution centers in Mexico. They don't even control the ability to get drugs cocaine from South America. But where they make their money is because they control the border areas where they can smuggle it into the US and so that business alliance that they have with those Mayos is very important.
- [117:55]
B
Now you said it was early 2024 when the Chapito civil war breaks out and then September.
- [118:01]
A
Yeah, September.
- [118:02]
B
Yeah, I'm sorry, September 2020. 24 after El Mayo was. Was. And we'll talk about that too. I want to come back to that. But you know, that's when the fentanyl decreases because the Chipitos were moving a lot of that into America. And this is like kind of the age old question with this. Why did the cartels decide to emphasize so much fentanyl? And I asked this for two reasons. Number one, it's a lot cheaper than some other drugs, so there's less money to be made on it. And number two, it is the most severely damaging and kills a lot of the client tell. So why did they make this bet when it was only going to.
- [118:37]
A
Because it's so easy to manufacture, so easy to make. Okay, so I so let's look at all the drugs in. In comparison, right? You have let's say methamphetamines, cocaine, marijuana and like in fentanyl, right?
- [118:50]
B
Yeah.
- [118:50]
A
Which fentanyl is not that hard. You don't need. For example, with cocaine and marijuana plantations and this and that. And then you have to take care of it and then you have to crop it and there's only certain amount of times you can. And then the other, the pro fennel, you just make done do, package sent and you can charge a ton of money to do it.
- [119:06]
B
Right.
- [119:07]
A
I so it's funny you asked this question one of the things I'm starting to do an initial research, I'll just say it here because if somebody wants to take my idea and run with it, I love it. I would not discount the possibility that the reason why there was a push to fentanyl was that the Mexican cartels weren't in a position to adjust their business model when marijuana started to become legal in certain U. S. States. Now let me make something clear. Drug cartels, you, the, the legalization conversation, don't mix it with the cartel violence. Those are two, you know, there's some overlap. It's completely separate. Right. But what was very interesting, you know, if you look up like Mexican cartels, illegal marijuana farms in the U.S. right? Cultivation in the U.S. and you like Mexican cartels. Cartels, cartel, like. Okay, wait, okay, that's the media being lazy. Number one, because there's no such thing as a Mexican cartel. Like which cartel? Got to give me a name. Number two, don't mix up Mexican crime syndicate or like the Mexican mafia with the cartel. Those are like two separate, right, like in the. In gangs, etc. Who really controls the illegal cultivation of marijuana in the United States from a criminal syndicate perspective is the Chinese. The Chinese TR Right, yes. Which is interesting because if you look at Mexico, the Mexican cartels control the marijuana trade in Mexico, which is illegal, if anything. Funny enough, Los Chapitos and other Mexican cartels wanted marijuana to be legal because they would have a monopoly in that market. They actually advocated inside of Mexico the legal. They wanted to see if they can get it legal because they would control that market.
- [120:38]
B
Right, because they already have it. Yeah.
- [120:40]
A
But the question then is why in the US when, why is it that the Chinese triads and the crime syndicates were the one who took control role of the illegal marijuana production and not the Mexican cartels? Because you can, you look at a graph, you can look at some graphs, you can look at like marijuana drug seizures on the border and you can look at fentanyl drug seizures on the border. It's kind of like, you know, like this. And that's the question that I have. Is it that the Mexican cartels, because they weren't able to, maybe they didn't even want to, they're like, it's not worth it for us. We don't want to try. Let the Chinese have it, let somebody else have it. You know, some of them do.
- [121:17]
B
And they made a lot of business partnerships with them too to do that.
- [121:20]
A
And is there some, is there some cartels that have maybe some marijuana production? And yeah, of Course, but is it their main business, drug trafficking? No, and I think that's why. And I think they said this is very easy to make, very easy to produce, very easy to ship and smuggle. So that's what we're going to do regardless of the damage it did. Now, I would say that. I think the political pushback that, that got to them and, and then the civil war and all that, that's now why we're seeing them refocus their efforts on cocaine and then methamphetamine as well. But the, but the what, what is very interesting is we're seeing a shift in methamphetamine productions. Although it's still happening in South America and Mexico, a lot of that is now being shipped over to Europe and Africa.
- [121:59]
B
Why is that? Because then they got to bring it back.
- [122:06]
A
Well, but, but, but you're avoiding sending oversaturated routes through the Atlantic and the Pacific that are controlled by the, that have a lot of intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies controlling those route. Right? So because if you're sending. That's how. Look, they, they seized 30 tons of cocaine in Africa, right? That's because of U. S. Intelligence. They probably tracked that because that. It didn't start in Sierra alone for the report that came from somewhere in south. Now, what, what the AFRICOM commander highlighted is do not discount the west Africa drug traffic trade route. And, and that. And unfortunately a lot of terrorist organizations like oh yeah, Hezbollah, jnam, the al Qaeda affiliate there, ISIS in the greatest they see, they kind of take a lot of money from that drug trade and that's a huge problem. But the west Africa route to Europe is a key drug trade route as well. I track like a lot of hashish farmer like Moroccan drug trafficking organizations in Morocco who openly share videos on social media. Them smuggling hashish and cocaine over to Spain and Europe.
- [123:03]
B
You try again.
- [123:04]
A
Yeah. So this one, where's this guy at?
- [123:07]
B
Sitting up in the middle of night watching a boat.
- [123:09]
A
I don't know if, I wonder if he got banned. Actually. That's a good question. Did he get banned?
- [123:12]
B
There he is at the trade Gibraltar.
- [123:14]
A
He. I wonder if he got. I would have to see if I got banned, but there was a very. And actually from a lot of the drug trade people, like he was like, oh yeah, you know, you know, he was very active. It looks like he might have turned it off because he would always post. But yeah, there's the Moroccan crime syndicate. Huge in drug trafficking. Huge in drug trafficking and their ability to kind of do that. So I think those are the type of conversations that, that, this, that the AFRICON piece really opens up is the shift in drug trafficking routes. And there could be an intelligence reasons why they did that. They don't want the law enforcement to go after them. It could be a cost, right? It's just easier to set up shop there, produce it there, and then. And then now we can ship it with less cost because now we can use normal, normal trade routes and we don't have to use like the narco submarines. And I think that's why. But that's been a trend that we've been seeing. I've been seeing in these last couple of years that more and more drug labs are being seized in Europe. There was one, I think it was last year, mid to late last year in Poland. You know, the Poland special forces seized a Mexican, a suspected Sinaloa cartel drug lab in. In Poland.
- [124:17]
B
They're everywhere, man.
- [124:18]
A
And what's interesting to expand on the Sinaloa cartel civil war is, is again, this idea that the violence hasn't spread outside. Right? It's. CNN had a great report and in some of the conversations I had with people on that was if you talk to Sinal cartel operatives in the United States, for example, they'll say, oh, that's civil war. Oh, that's a Mexican thing. Like that does not impact us. We're not involved. We're still Caloa cartel in Mexico. They might have a differentiating identity idea in Mexico. We still view ourselves as Sinalo. We're not involved in the. That's strange and, and interesting. And I said that is a very interesting dynamic. Because if the civil war was having an impact internationally, there would be two things we'd see. One, violence, number one, but number two, we would see. And we haven't really seen this and we'll see if it is that. But CG and G then would absorb
- [125:08]
B
Los Chapitos drug trafficking routes just because there's. They're completely distracted with the violence.
- [125:14]
A
No. Or no? If you're making the argument that or the. Because if you're making the argument. Argument that the civil war is also viewed internationally, you would see Chapito's drug trafficking routes being absorbed by CGNG because of the alliance. We're not seeing that. Okay, we're not seeing that. And so that's a very. It's very interesting that the violence is confined inside of Mexico and not in, let's say Poland or Africa, where they're there. So that's another very interesting dynamic as well.
- [125:44]
B
Yeah, and obviously like this all, as we alluded to, breaks out with the very strange capture of El Mayo, which periodically comes up on different episodes of this show, even coming up on two years later. Because here you have a guy who operated as the other half of the cartel effectively. You had the El Chapo faction, you had his faction. And he's a total opposite over old, more grandfatherly kind of dude living up in the hills. Has a real iron fist on his operations and his power. And it was long suspected, suspected, not confirmed or anything, that there had to be some sort of deal or some sort of understanding or some sort of straight up like, alliance between him and United States intelligence. And then you see him put on a plane where he is essentially like duct taped and said it, you're going to America. And he's met on the Runway by all kinds of obviously American agencies and law enforcement arrested. And we don't hear a ton about it. Obviously he's been going through hearings and stuff, I believe here in New York. But like that kind of came out of nowhere. And I still haven't gotten a straight answer from people I don't know. There is one to be clear. Clear about what the hell happened there. As far as you can tell though, you know, what's your best theory or what information do you see or know that could say this is, this is what it was. Either he was working with the US or he wasn't.
- [127:14]
A
From my understanding, he wasn't. He was just untouchable. He was. That's why the US didn't tell Mexico about this operation. If anything, the Mexicans were the one who were protecting him. So like in the 40 years I say he was a drug trafficking, drug trafficking trafficker, there was literally not a single time he was almost captured.
- [127:34]
B
Why would the Mexicans protect him? Because he was better to deal with than Chapa.
- [127:39]
A
Yeah, I mean, you can make the argument that Mayo was the real power of the Sinaloga.
- [127:43]
B
Yes, I've heard that.
- [127:44]
A
Yeah. Like, and I the face, I would, I would fall within that realm. And if anything, as I think I like how you said, you know, the older gentleman in the mountains, if one thing towards the later part of his life, Mayo specifically, he was much more interested in maintaining the peace. So anytime there would be factions of the Caloa cartel fighting each other. So for example, there was a Loos were fighting Losaris, which two factions of the SOA cartel, you know, way back before the split happened, like, then Mayo would personally get involved to try to stop it and even to A point where he, like, kicked out L. Temporarily. There was reporting that he kicked them out of the organization because they wouldn't bend to his will. And then L like, oh, okay, okay, okay. No, no, no. Russos are still to this day part of the Mayos. Interesting, right? The Russians are called not, they're not affiliated with Russia or President Putin or anything like that. They just love to troll. And the, their leader's nickname is the Russian. So that's it. Actually, I can even show you in the map just. So if, so if we go from the map for a second.
- [128:40]
B
So we're going to use the out.
- [128:42]
A
Dude, I, I. Anytime you have a guest that talks about cartels by all, we're just going
- [128:45]
B
to have this up.
- [128:46]
A
So go all the way to the top left corner. You see that little purple strip that kind of goes down between the yellow, the, that like orange? Yeah. Now go left. You see that purple on the left of that right there? Click that should say there. Lousos
- [129:01]
B
la maa.
- [129:02]
A
No, no further. Actually, let me see there. That right here, Right here.
- [129:10]
B
Los Russos are an armed wing of the Caloa Cartel, specifically aligned with Ismael and Mayo Zada.
- [129:17]
A
Yeah.
- [129:17]
B
So they operate as part of La Maiza, the Mayo loyalist faction. And their main rival within the cartel are Los Chapitos, the sons of Joaquin El Chapo Guzma.
- [129:27]
A
So they used to fight heavily against Los Salazars. Los Salasads used to belong to Los Chapitos, but then they formed their own group, which is that yellow. Now you see that yellow that brought right there. So if you click there, they broke off and they form, as you can see, the, the, the black. That's again Hearst map. I mean, Hearst diagram on the top cartel, they formed what's called the Independent Cartel of Sonora, which is Los Salazar, Los Paredes. They all used to belong to Los Chapito. So before the Sinaloa cartel civil war, this was a break that happened before that where these three factions said, we're done with Los Chapitos. We're forming our own group. And so they loosely called themselves the Independent Cartel. Sonor was a confederation, but larussos used to fight heavily against Los Salas. And then the Mayo was the one who said, hey, we need this peace. And even when this kind of violence happened over here with a, with the Independent Cartel Sonora, even Maya was, you know, that was Chapito problem. But he was still very interested in trying to maintain it. You know, this is kind of what was going on. He was more, he already made it like what else does he need? So I think he just knew a lot of Mexicans dirty laundry and he knew how to operate an assistant to make sure he was untouchable, that even the Mexicans didn't want to go after him. And I think that's why during the Biden administration, they said, we're going to go after him. And they used to used Joaquin Guzman, the son, to. To do that. And I think the. The way. The reasoning they were able to turn them is because they managed to extradite Ol Video Guzman right after the second Kulia Canasso in 2023. What was very interesting is when Ovido. When the Kulia Canasso happened and Ovidio Guzman was captured, dosthapitos felt betrayed that the Mayos did not respond. Because if you go. So go back. If you go back to Ca. So scroll down, Down, Right, so that yellow area. Okay, so zoom in on the. Where. So it's a little bit further down. Sorry, Keep on going, keep on. Okay, so that where the yellow and then that. Or right there where all the little center areas, like the cyan. Keep. No going. Go down, go down right there. Okay, so before this, so you see that yellow wasn't always that far out, but you can see towards the east of it in the northeast. Like, that's Mayo's territory, right? That's for the most part, if you go two years back for them, you know, a little bit different. But for the most part, that's where it was. Like, the miles were further in. And those chapitos, as you said, kind of control the urban area. When Ovido Guzman was captured in the Culiacanaso happened where the chapitos just went haywire and brought the city to violence. They wanted the Mayos to help, and the Miles didn't.
- [131:49]
B
That's a no. No.
- [131:50]
A
And so my suspicion was the US Then was able to let. Because Ovido Guzman was in prison and they had conversations with him. They were like, Ovido probably said, said, hey, we can help you get in Mayo. I can get my brother, Hain Guzman, who's in within those chapitos is absolutely irrelevant. It's an irrelevant figure, less so than even more irrelevant to Jesus Alfredo and. And I think Hua King Usman was a sacrificial lamb. And then they managed to get him and to trick Mayo Zambala to get on a plane and fly him over to El Paso, where he was arrested. And then his son took over. My Myo Flo. His smile.
- [132:25]
B
Okay, I gotta go to the bathroom real fast. But I want to talk about the sun when we get back. And then there's a bigger picture there thing too that I want to get to and get your thoughts on. So we'll be right back.
- [132:36]
A
Oh, good job.
- [132:37]
B
It's funny. We were just talking off camera. So you know, n do.
- [132:39]
A
Yeah. I thought we were live. I didn't know that. But yeah, Jeff, we've. He didn't remember. We. You did the space and I, I
- [132:47]
B
kept hearing your voice and I'm like, God damn, I've heard this voice before. It's cuz, you know, on the, on Twitter you're like behind profile handles and whatever and there's a ton of people talking. But yeah, we did a space right after the Iran war broke out. I remember that now. It's funny.
- [132:59]
A
And no, the Venezuela Maduro raid.
- [133:02]
B
Yeah but this was. We were talking about both because this
- [133:04]
A
was right after broke out. I remember. And so yeah, so Jeff, I've also been on his show. Great. You know, he's, he's. He's. Jeff knows his man, you know, does a lot. And, and we've actually done where anytime something major happens in Mexico ago like it'll be Jeff Katarina, myself, just a quick. Oh, we gotta go live. So you, you know, if you ever want to join us on live. We just the three of us. Oh, what's going on? And we did that for. When A M was killed. He did a breaking news live space on Twitter and YouTube and we were all trying to react. I was trying to check the news and all that because it was just chaos.
- [133:35]
B
So shout out. Nadu always finds a way to come up on these shows.
- [133:39]
A
He's the man.
- [133:40]
B
He's been on the show a couple of times, does a great job. But we were talking about El Mayo's son before we went to break right there. So he's been effectively in charge of that faction since his father, since the day his father was captured.
- [133:55]
A
And that's very interesting how quickly he was able to consolidate control. Now, now. So here, here's the thing, right when you're the up and coming leader, you obviously get in the position of power because the faction leaders coalesce around you and they say, yes, we acknowledge you're going to be a leader. But if one thing El Maito Flaco has been very good at is saying, I'm not going to rule where I'm beholden to my faction leaders, my faction leaders are going to be beholden to me. I'm going to have the gravitas of my father. Right. And. And I think, you know, he's getting there. And it's very interesting how his operational approach has been to just go on a war path everywhere. Like, he's not holding back. He's declared one, you know, the Chapos. He's increased his offensive operations against Huisk New Generation Cartel, Chiapas, Zakatekas, Nayarit. You can even make the argument that in Zakas he's doing pretty, pretty well. There's very interesting dynamics there. And so that's where he's kind of been that. That figure. And. And he is getting to the point where he's also having that same. It's very interesting. Like again, it's like we were talking about the emojis or. I don't know if I. We mentioned that before. Like. Oh, yeah. So it's very interesting. Before the mayos were always that hat, right. The. The cowboy hat. And now it's the horse. Horse, because that's. That's his symbol. So everything now is kind of centered around the horse. And that's why when you see the watermarks of some of these videos, that's how you can tell who. Where did that video get pushed from?
- [135:23]
B
Right.
- [135:23]
A
Is it a chapita? Because it'll put the watermark and some of them have that. And so like the famous one that it's always the. The my. There's a one that's like the horse head with a cowboy hat. And then the horse is eating a pizza. Slice of pizza.
- [135:37]
B
Right.
- [135:38]
A
It's the trolling. And so that's kind of the things. But yes, the. You starting to see. And I wouldn't even say start, it's almost complete where my maito Flaco has that absolute control. And if anything, even Los Cabras. I've heard kind of reports that he was kind of upset with us because the CAs haven't been doing so well. One of their factions called Grupo Fletcher.
- [135:57]
B
Grupo Frea.
- [135:58]
A
Grupo Fletcher, which is the arrow group. Like the. Like the bow and arrow. So actually that's their emoji. They have like a bow and arrow.
- [136:04]
B
It's kind of hard.
- [136:05]
A
Yeah. So they have not been doing so well. And so I think there had. I heard rumors of kind of his frustration with them. And, you know, nobody's really going to challenge. So then the question then becomes, you know, with Holis New generation cartel, which I know we can go after, you know, with Mento that his stepson ot kind of took over. You know, that's kind of what you see. But I would say Maito Flaco has absolute control over his organization.
- [136:27]
B
Now, what I was thinking with the whole El Mayo thing though, and. And this been in my head before that even happened in 2024. But it's just the perspective. Persistent thought since with some people I've also talked with in the studio. Here is where at least United States intelligence really stands on the cartels.
- [136:46]
A
And.
- [136:47]
B
And let me give you some context, what I mean by that. So my friend Luis Navia was in here back in episodes 221 and 222, and he was effectively, it's very real. He was like, by the end of his career, like the chief smuggler for every cartel except the Asian ones around the world. And he was taken down in Operation Germany, Bernie, in Venezuela in 2000. It was like 15 different countries working on it, all kinds of. And so he, you know, this is a guy who knew and touched pretty much everyone, you know, knew Pablo Escobar, knew the leaders of the Mexican cartels, all these different things. And obviously he gives a great breakdown of that. And he's the kind of guy, like, he's helped with things attacking the cartels, with the government and stuff since then, like, even after he was out of prison and everything. Like, he just, like, he enjoys being around it, I guess. And so there was a guy that I got connected to back then through him that was a. He's a. He's a CIA knock and, you know, says he's not in it anymore, but you know, that he's been in it for 50 years and now he's a part of a. A company that has 4x intelligence guys that happens to show up in a lot of third world countries and six months later, or poof, you know, new leadership happens in the country. So, you know, you can do with that what you will. But this guy will talk to me on WhatsApp some sometimes. And I'm not really sure what to think of it, but good dude with me at least. But, you know, his career, the story of his career is very telling to me because he was effectively doing a regular job, won't say what it was on the west coast. And he was dating the niece of a very, very high place placed like the highest placed cartel guys in Mexico. This is early days. So I guess like CIA was watching him. Like, who the is this guy who's the niece of so and so. They see him going to Mexico, staying at the house sometimes, and they basically looked at him and they're like, this guy would make a great spy so they went to him and they said, hey, you know, we want you to work for us. You'd be a knock. You're going to be using your connections and eventually you're going to end up fully in Mexico so we can know what's going on and everything. He was like, oh, hell no. Listen, I, I'm, I'm, I have no business whatever. You know, my girls, uncles are doing. Like, that's not my problem. I'm not going to be a rat and like, take them down. And they're like, take them down? What do you mean take. No, we don't want you to take them down.
- [139:16]
A
We want you to work with them.
- [139:18]
B
And basically they were, they were like, no, no, the point is not to stop this. We want to use this machine for all the other means that we want to get after. Long story short, he ends up down there for, for as far as I could tell, it was like 20, 30 years, something like that. And you see story after story like this where intelligence services are operating within the cartels. And to be clear, their job is not to be the FBI and like, make arrests. I understand that, but like, it doesn't seem like they're trying to stop these guys. So when you see something like El Milo happen, do you not wonder if it's like a bigger picture? You know, really just a pawn on the board play so they can. Maybe he wasn't playing ball on certain things that they wanted to, to do.
- [139:59]
A
So let me ask this. What, what years are we talking about when this whole nag and all that,
- [140:03]
B
more or less this, this guy would have been for that role. As best as I can tell, he would have started in the 70s and he would have still been doing it in the 2000s, maybe into the early 2010s.
- [140:19]
A
So I can tell you right now. And again, you can look at this. Reuter reports about the CIA. The CIA is, is, if anything, especially now with this Trump administration, are going to, if they're not the lead, if they're not already, they're going to be the lead agency taking down these cartels. They are a key component. And I think there's a, you know, people don't. I'm going to use this. Like, for example, when I was deployed and when I was doing work in the company, like, yeah, we, you know, we interacted with the CIA. Now granted, I was an analyst, so we mostly talked to the analyst because, you know, I do believe a lot of times as, like, I guess, like over, I guess that whole secrecy, things like, you Know like everything is a Secret Squirrel. Everything is so mysterious and it's a CIA everywhere. And I just say people like, you know, my, I remember the first time I ever dealt with the agency. I remember thinking to myself, my first reaction was because I was like a lieutenant, I was like, man, this is like the office, what the hell?
- [141:17]
B
Under the overwhelming.
- [141:18]
A
Yeah, just, but just you know, now granted, analyst, analyst type of thing. But it's like, you know, the thing, I do believe that the CIA, at least in the 70s, obviously their priority was communism. They didn't give a about, they were like, oh, we don't exactly. I'd agree with you. We like the whole Iran Contra, you know, it was communism, all that. Now there has been even for a while this fundamental shift in the prerogatives of the CIA in the Western hemisphere, specifically with the Trump administration, where now the priority and the emphasis is, is stopping all of this.
- [141:46]
B
Right.
- [141:46]
A
I mean they have been. I would even make the argument that in many operations that led to the capture of the death of a cartel member, it probably became, it came from information from the CIA.
- [141:57]
B
But again, is that just them wiping what they view as a pawn off the board when the pawn gets annoying with how they actually want to do things and they, they can find someone better.
- [142:06]
A
I mean, I guess it's a question then though, is the, is, is the argument the CIA is involved in the drug trade and they're trying to do it to make the as much money as possible or is there other motives?
- [142:15]
B
I don't think it would be to make as much money as possible. There's better ways to do that. I, I've never thought of that angle that that wouldn't be what I would think it would be for the intelligence sources. And I'll give you another example. I did have a knock sitting in that chair twice. Matthew Hedger, and it would be more recent years who became a major league money launderer for the cartels at the behest of the CIA. And one of the things he did, he described it in detail here about how he flipped a top 10 banker at a top 10 bank in a ball bar to launder money for the cartels. You know, that's not really stopping the cartels. It's kind of.
- [142:51]
A
And so that's the con. So and that from the development from intelligence sources, you know, that's where the question now that we have though is, is that now, for example, especially with all these drone strikes that were going on now that has that fundamentally changed from the director to the agency. And I think because a lot of the operations, the Myo 100, like, there's a lot of interagency. I think one of the very interesting conversations, like if I'm a DEA guy, Kiki, I'm wondering and concerned about if my position now is my agency is redundant because the FBI is going to be. Is a lot more involved in a lot of this. Actually, the MYO capture, it's not necessarily what, you know, the CIA obviously plays a role and they're playing a lot of role, especially in the vetted units. Do not underestimate CIA's Mexican vetted unit. Those guys, guys don't. Those guys do not play around. Why they're the top of the top of Mexico Special Forces. Like if you're going to look at like the Mexico Seal Team 6 and Delta, it's the Mexican Special Forces vetting unit by the CIA. I'm telling you, this Reuter reports, read it. It's phenomenal. And, and if you read that, you actually, I don't know, you. You could do like reuter, CIA, Mexico, maybe they have a. Like for. To search it, to find it. And you read it and it lays out holy. How this Mexican unit, through information, through the CIA that they get it, are actively going against a lot of these people. Right. And it kind of goes. It kind of undermines that argument of, well, why do we need to do unilateral operations? If we could just have our vetted units do it, I think. Is this it? Yeah.
- [144:14]
B
Inside the CIA's secret fight. And they've been doing this against Mexican drug cartels, working with special Mexican army and navy units. The CIA for years has been running covert operations to hunt down Mexico's most wanted narcos, a Reuters investigation finds. Among the captures, a son of cartel chief Joaquin El Chapo Guzman. Let's scroll down and read some of this. In January 2023, the Mexican government deployed helicopter gunships and hundreds of soldiers into rural Sinaloa to capture Ovidio Guzman Lopez, the son of the imprisoned cartel kingpin Joaquin El Chapo Guzman. In the hunt for the young capo, the mission's architects worked hand in glove with a powerful American backer, the Central Intelligence Agency. Ahead of the raid, America's premier spy agency leveraged its vast eavesdropping apparatus to surveil the communications of Guzman's associates to locate him in his mother's home and hometown in the western Sierra Madre mountains. According to four former intelligence and law enforcement sources, CIA analysts assembled a detailed dossier known as Targeting package on El Chapo's flashy son. The CIA was helped by intel from a member of ol video circle who had security flipped. Three of the sources added, let me just go a little more deep. Finally, to carry out the arrest itself, the Mexican army deployed an elite unit that was trained, equipped and vetted by the CIA, a dozen current and former U.S. and Mexican officials said. A Reuters investigation has found that the CIA has been running covert ops in Mexico for years to track down the country's most wanted drug traffickers. The secret the US Spy agency works closely with special narco hunting units inside the Mexican military. With the permission of the Mexican government, the CIA gives training and equipment to these outfits as well as financial backing for activities like travel. The US Spy agency also screens their members with US administered polygraph tests, which is why the groups are often called CIA vetted units. Today there are at least two such CIA vetted military units operating in Mexico. In addition to the Mexican army army group, the Nabdol video, there's a special Mexican navy intelligence outfit, according to eight current former Mexican and U. S officials.
- [146:08]
A
So, so what? So I say that, right? And, and then obviously not that that's what we're talking about. The better way we saw pernicious propaganda like HSI has one. FBI. Da FBI. From my understanding, from my reporting, and I posted this shortly after because I reached out to sources. The. The capture of Amaya was really the. The who deserves all the credits. That FBI.
- [146:28]
B
Why is that?
- [146:29]
A
They were the ones who led it from my sources in my conversation.
- [146:31]
B
So they had like an insight.
- [146:33]
A
They had a way to get inside. Yeah, they had a way to inside talk to Joaquin Guzman and use Joaquin Guzman to turn in El Mayo. Right. This one, obviously this is talking about a video Guzmans with the CIA and how they do it. Now to your, to your overall point, because I was like thinking while you're reading that, let me, let me put this way, let's imagine again, I'm making the scenario, but let's imagine you're the CIA, right, Direct director and you have a priority, obviously to get sources inside of China. You want to know what Xi Jinping's thinking, what they're talking about, and you find maybe, I don't know, one of Xi Jinping's I'm gonna make it up. Nephews is hugely involved in money laundering for cartels.
- [147:12]
B
That would be a great find.
- [147:14]
A
And would you, would you think that the CIA's priority then is going to try to get him to turn him over or to find A way to make him successful, make him into a source and find ways to leverage that because you also overall power, you know is to get info on Xi Jingping. Right.
- [147:28]
B
Second one.
- [147:29]
A
Yeah. Now are you. Now you. We can blast them. Got it. But in the end, I mean welcome to the reality of the world of just like. Well, it's Xi Jinping we're talking about. Right. You know now granted maybe if with now this is where the administration.
- [147:42]
B
Oh, I'd be okay with. Hold on a minute. I'd be okay with this because that's. That is like forget all the CIA does. That's actually the job is to cultivate the intelligence in an effort to actually stem this from happening.
- [147:55]
A
Lot of these sources and these acts like you would say is like they're not going to know why.
- [147:59]
B
Yeah.
- [147:59]
A
And that's where they're just a little. That's the pawn of the game now.
- [148:02]
B
Yeah.
- [148:03]
A
Can you make the argument in my own some areas and some aspects in public school especially in the Cold War now where that. Yeah, sure. I'm not debating that we're not going to get the full picture but as this report laid out and oh by the way when we were talking about the CN the CNN report where they were doing unilateral assassinations the New York Times report is the one that they didn't do the assess the Mexicans doing it through the support CIA also shows that they're a key component of the car to cartel fight. And that goes to my point about the dea. You have the FBI being the lead agency that captured Aayo. The FBI doing a lot Ryan Weddings. Right. Who was the one who announced Ryan Weddings was captured?
- [148:34]
B
Josh Patel.
- [148:37]
A
So if you're the don't give him.
- [148:39]
B
Come on.
- [148:40]
A
I'm just saying what's an ass. I'm not giving anybody credit. I'm saying what an. All right, don't look. He was the messenger. I'm not disputing that.
- [148:47]
B
You know One eye hunting, one eye fishing.
- [148:50]
A
But you know it was the ethical the FBI. Right. Again, if you're the dea, then why are you here? That's. And I think that there's going to be a lot of that interagency thing. Look, DAA does great things and they do but this always has been viewed as a dea. What I'm trying to get. I'm not trying to attack the D A. That's not what I'm getting. No, I understand but it's like now with the. Specifically with the Trump administration. I think the before and after. If there's one thing that's going to change is this component of U.S. national Security Inform policy where this is going to be primary action aspect of US law enforcement, intelligence and military is going to be the. This counter cartel fight. Right. Is going to be this drug trafficking fight. This shield of America. You can blast it as bravado. Fine. I'm not disputing that obviously now you know Christy Noem, the former Homeland Security secretary who's now the head of, you know, Shield of America. We can say what we want, but do not underestimate the influence it's gaining with a lot of Latin American countries. Who then is going to turn that into what we don't want. China, for example to be your main economic partner. We don't want them to control this port. We don't want them to control this because for example, Ecuador down with that President Aboa like he is all like let's go Y and and to be honest, you know, he has a lot of the popular backing for people to be like, yeah, we view cartels as. And these gang member, those Lobos, those Tornados being the two main ones that are foreign terrorist organizations declared by the US he has the support of the Ecuadorian people to to heavy role because they're done.
- [150:18]
B
Dude. Yeah. Luis Navia was telling me about this over two years ago now pound table was like bro, you got to look at Ecuador. I'm here right now, brother. It's crazy. And the more I hear from you know, just like around the edges guys like you like talking about this. There's a lot going and no one talks about it like in at length.
- [150:40]
A
But so here's the reason why. Here's the reason why. I'll give you a down and journey of why. So the there. There's multiple games but the two ones are Los Lobos Tornados. Lobos have an alliance with CG&G. Los Tornados with the Sonoa cartels. Right. And so the ide. That's why I was saying that's proxy fight. So like Ecuador is the one area where you can say the extension of the Mexican cartel wars is kind of continuing with the Lobos Tornados. The reason why it's so important is because Ecuador, the Pacific route in. In the drug trafficking accounts for 70 to 80% of the drugs that reach to the United States. So the Pacific Pacific. 70 to 80% of the. It's assessed 70 to 80 of the drugs that reach the United States come from the maritime Pacific route.
- [151:19]
B
Wow.
- [151:20]
A
Okay. So that's why one of the specific Ports in Ecuador is so important is for the drug trade is Guayaquil. Yes. Pull that up on a map.
- [151:28]
B
How do you spell it? G, U, A Y, A Q, U,
- [151:32]
A
I, L. You got it. No, but in Ecuador. So. Yeah, but go all the way. So zoom out. You can just zoom out. Go and go to Ecuador. Door right, down, down, left, left, left. There it is. Keep on going there. Right there you see the Gua Scroll. Keep on scrolling in. Keep on scrolling. Right there, right that, that right there.
- [151:51]
B
You see Keel?
- [151:52]
A
Yeah, that's it. That, that a lot of the violence is there is astronomical, but because a lot of the drugs end up there, right? Because it's kind of a port place. Yeah, yeah. And so, and so the Colombian Pacific and the Ecuador. Ecuador are huge for the drug trafficking route. So that's why Lobos, Tornados and other gangs are. The violence is there. You can't talk about. Another shout out to Jeff. You can't talk about Ecuador without talking about the Albanian mafia. They're huge. Yeah, they're huge in there.
- [152:20]
B
Yeah.
- [152:20]
A
And so, and, but a lot of international groups there. So. So because when you're looking at the drug trade and organized crime, for example, a lot of the things when people said, well, you know, they said, well, Maduro was involved in the drug trade and then they would say, well, Venezuela and the Caribbean route only accounts for 8% of the drugs. It's like, okay, what you're focusing on is the export import, right. How does it, where does it leave from and how does it get to the U.S. right. Or, or granted Venezuela from a drug trade perspective was much more heavily to Europe than to the U.S. right. If that's the European. But you're, you're mixing, you're, you're, you're focusing on the wrong thing. Because by that logic then Mexican cartels aren't responsible for any drugs reaching the US if you're going to use the drug trade route, well, it's really just Ecuador. So we should just bomb and seize Ecuador. But that's not how these organizations operate from. It's. They control. They're like the managers, they're like the company.
- [153:12]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [153:13]
A
They're the ones that manage everything. The, the, the planning and getting it, processing it, getting either directly through networks they control or third party networks that they pay and manage to get it to where they need to go. And they're ups.
- [153:27]
B
Yes.
- [153:28]
A
I always say, what's a cartel Think of Amazon and Blackwater merged into one.
- [153:33]
B
Oh, that's good.
- [153:34]
A
That's, that's my Comparison for Mexican car and Prince.
- [153:37]
B
Just what a combo.
- [153:39]
A
And then when it gets to the U.S. it's like, it's like the maritime, like, like MERS, like the maritime ship. Like all they care about is getting the drug to a destination in the U.S. chicago, Los Angeles, New York, every Atlanta, Tulsa, Oklahoma, for all they care. But once it reaches to a certain point in the U.S. the Sonala Cartel, the CGNG or the Mexican cartel is like, all right, to the local gangs or organized crime, here's the drugs. You sell it to the Americans. We are out. That's why like there was a great report from the Boston Globe where the DEA said they detained dozens of Sinaloa cartel operators in a major drug bust in Northeast. In the Northeast, right in the Massachusetts and Maine. It was like not a single one of them was. That was just a press statement. It was a lie. Not a single one of them. Listen to call it to cartel members. They just, they just traffic cocaine and like sell drugs to the people. But like you're not. That's it.
- [154:29]
B
Yeah. DIA. The DEA said it arrested 171 high ranking Sinaloa cartel members. A Spotlight investigation found that's not true. We're gonna Mike Benzit real quick. You ever see this trick?
- [154:40]
A
Yeah, of course I was gonna say.
- [154:42]
B
You're an Osin.
- [154:43]
A
You gotta know. Of course you do.
- [154:45]
B
Yeah. This was so cool when Benzi showed us this.
- [154:48]
A
There's another one if archive doesn't work. The other one is. I don't know if you want to say that, but remove paywall.com.
- [154:54]
B
yeah, we can say. What are they going to do about it? All right, so let's go down a little bit. All right. President Trump's escalating war against Latin America cartels crashed into this leafy old mill town with surprising force one morning in late August when heavily armed federal agents and local police kicked off a series of raids by tossing a flashbang grenade and bashing in a door. The show of force was followed by an announcement from Fed authorities that in coordinated raids across New England, they had seized more than 500 pounds of drugs and captured nearly 200 members of Mexico's notorious Caloa cartel, the violent syndicate that supplies illegal drugs to the U.S. special agent in charge of the U.S. drug Enforcement Administration's New England division, Jared For Forget said unfortunate name said. The crackdown led to 171 cartel member arrests across the region, including 27 and Franklin. The DEA didn't name any of the suspects because they forgot them. But Forget described that as A high level arrest. They, they were part of a national sweep that netted more than 600 operatives of the feared organization over five days.
- [155:58]
A
So there's. Here's one of my favorite quotes. I'm going to say scroll down, let me see if I can find it.
- [156:04]
B
Hold on. We're the dea. We're not going after low level retail drug traffickers. Forget told the interviewer at the time.
- [156:11]
A
Here, scroll down. It's from the father of one of them.
- [156:13]
B
The father, okay, So I can guarantee that he's not part of the Caloa cartel. Scott Aladdi said of his son Tyler, very Spanish name there, who was charged in state court in Franklin with a felony level drug sale and immediately released without. Without having to post bail. He isn't a high ranking member of anything. He's high ranking. Dumb. Yeah. W for the dad on that was
- [156:37]
A
one of my friends. So why do I show this. This article, right? I mean, because it goes back to this idea of how do cartels operate? Like for example, when we're talking, why weren't the cartels able to seize the illegal marijuana trade in the US because that's not what they're here for. They don't. You're not. And anybody. If you go to the street and somebody says, oh, I'm selling cocaine directly to somebody, it's like, I work for the Snow cartel. No, you, you don't. Shut up. That's how this work. Hell, you're not even gonna find that in Mexico, man. It's actually one of the things that actually happens in Mexico. They're very protective of their brand. If you start throwing that, you're like, oh, you're done.
- [157:11]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [157:12]
A
And if you're not, oh, they'll dismember you, record it and share it.
- [157:15]
B
They'll sell it to your family in
- [157:17]
A
multiple boxes in the U.S. that's what they're. They're wholesale. Get all the drugs in one area and then you figure it out. Yeah, that's the business. And because what. What is a cartel? You know, when you. One of my favorite scenes in in Sakario 2 is when they cross the border. And you remember there was that van and they're trying to cross the border and there's like. And it's very ominous. And then the dude opens it and it's just a mom with a child. Oh, it's good money. And I bring my child because nobody thinks anything about it. It's like, yes. What is a cartel member in the US Lawyers, businessmen, men, accountants.
- [157:54]
B
Yep.
- [157:55]
A
How do you, you know, make fraud, fraudulent documents, cash businesses. That's what they are. Yes. There's. There's Sakarios here. Sure. That's not the majority of them. Why? They're not here to shoot people up. They're here to make money. So you need to have an operation inside of the United States capable of making tens of billions of dollars yearly, either from drug trade or. Here's another one where specifically the Holis New Generation cartel probably makes at least a billion dollars a year, if not, not more, selling stolen Mexican oil. Who? American?
- [158:29]
B
Yeah.
- [158:30]
A
There was indictments in Texas.
- [158:32]
B
Yes.
- [158:32]
A
From families who were buying Mexican oil from Primito.
- [158:36]
B
Wasn't there Utah as well?
- [158:38]
A
Yeah.
- [158:38]
B
Yeah.
- [158:39]
A
So, for example, one of the sanctions actually, if you scroll out and go back to Mexico, I'll show you. So this guy Primito. So scroll in and northeast by. By Brownsville, Texas. Okay, so scroll a little bit more. More in. So the light blue, click on the light blue. So that's Metros. Right, The Metros. The guy here, the. The leader is Primito. So the Golf Cartel had a civil war. And so there's two groups. It's that light blue and then the dark blue. That is Grupo Scorpio and the Scorpion group. Right. So those are the two. The black we said is a different cartel was the Northeast Cartel. The red underneath that is a. Is called old school Zetas. Right. So those are the, the three groups in. In. In. In the Osetas, Viejas, Escuelas, Metros and Grupo Scorpion. Metros and Grupo Scorpion are two factions of the Gulf Cartel. But in reality, the Metros now should be considered instead of a faction of the Gulf Cartel. They're basically CJNG and Tamaulipas. Right. And leader Primito has very deep. He had very deep personal relationship with El Mencho. Which. One of the questions for me was when El Mencho was killed, what happens to. What happens to his influence within the organization? Organization. Because although he wasn't part on paper of the leadership that was El Cardino before was with Cardinal El Sapo, Ferro, Tres were the top four. El Primito had a lot of personal relationship with El Mencho. So now that I mentioned is killed and his. And Now El Mentro stepson03 took over what happens to Primito? But Primito was sanctioned by o fact because he was heavily involved in this. Of selling stolen oil into Texas. Texas. And some of those indictments in Texas was because of him. And so he's, he's key. So they have. You see that red line? They have an alliance with the old school Zetas and they used to be fighting for years against Scorpion group. But in February 2025, shortly after Trump assumed office, Metros and Scorpion Group declared a ceasefire because the violence was getting out of hand. Actually, an American citizen died from an IED in Tamaulipas because of the war in 2025, I believe in February or late January. And so the Mexican government at the Apolipa state government kind of went to the Metros and said, scorpion Groups. You guys stop. Yeah, we like, this is getting out of hand. You guys need to stop.
- [160:45]
B
You talked earlier about your time interfacing with. I forget this specific group, but with elements of the Mexican military and how great these guys were. Mpsi, the military and talented and trying to go after the cartels and all that. So we're not talking about in the factions. You're working with people that are, you know, secretly on the take from the cartel and stuff like that. These are guys that are going to after it that said all different elements of the government or other parts of the military and things like that. We see it over and over again. They're actually just working with the cartels. So it's kind of like whack a mole all the time because you got your groups of good guys who are trying to stop. They go stop something and then something happens on the other side, and now they got to go try to stop that because their other guys are on the inside making that happen.
- [161:28]
A
How.
- [161:28]
B
How possible is it to really get like. We've been looking at this map all, all day. It's like Game of Thrones, except there's no. It's not the government. It's all a bunch of cartels.
- [161:37]
A
The government. Is that the government? Here, scroll out just one sec. Just scroll out. I'll go. Go. Scroll down. Keep on going down. Like mid Mexico. Zoom in on mid Mexico. You see that? Like go left a little bit. That yellowish again?
- [161:50]
B
Yeah.
- [161:50]
A
Click one of there. Okay, let me see.
- [161:52]
B
Isn't this where Dave Frank was shooting it out? It's pretty similar, right?
- [161:58]
A
Wait, no, no. Where's the little re. Scroll in there. This is. I'm trying to find. Whereas that's Knight's Templar. It should be around. Oh, right here. Scroll there. That's why I couldn't see things right here. So, okay, right there. Let me go there. Okay. I was like. I knew it was there. Like, there it is. Okay, so that's called Loas Michan lore. So that's Loosely part of what's called the United Cartel. Cartel Unidos. The United Cartels has various different groups. One of the group is called LO and this guy specifically the leader that is called EO R5. There's Mexican military bases there, right? Like in that town. Or guess who they. Guess who they work for that guy.
- [162:41]
B
Yeah, I was going to say they
- [162:42]
A
got to be on like even CG and G is like, you guys work for these guys. So we're going to go mess you up. And. And C.J. and G and Zakatecas, they have a front called Foras aas. They've been blasting the Zakateca state police, specifically the Frizz F R I Z and a former. And actually funny enough, they were blasting a general. He was in charge of the. The 11th military zone in of Mexico. The Mexican army and Zakatecas they were black for being on Mayo's payroll. They actually released a statement that I. I kind of made a tweet about it. It's like, hey, this specific Mexican general they've been blasting for being on the payroll the miles. And like two days ago I found out he got relie of command. I was like, I wonder if that had to do with anything or you know. But maybe. But they were like blasting. And so. But to your point, like you like why was Governor Rocha, right, The governor, the former Governor Calo, who just resigned, indicted because he was with Los Chapitos. So when the Chap. The Caloa cartel civil war happened, you had a situation where the Mexican federal government clearly was supporting Lyos. Like undisputable. Like it was clear as day the Mexican military was helping the. And now you run into issue with the state police and even the municipal police had a long history of working with Los Chapitos. I.
- [163:59]
B
It's just like it's a clusterfuck.
- [164:02]
A
Actually, here's a clusterfuck. Look up. I'm. Dude, I'm like, let's. I'll go put. Look this guy up, General and then it's the Infuegos. It's C I E N. And so for people when you notice me, speak. So sorry. I used to live in Spain for seven years. So the way I learned Spanish is. Yeah, okay.
- [164:20]
B
Actually do me a favor, Barona.
- [164:22]
A
Put New York Times on. On the Google with that. Like that. That. Let's see.
- [164:31]
B
Well, archive that. That FOS is there. Dude, that's.
- [164:35]
A
Read this and I mean it's a long. It's a long article. Don't get me wrong.
- [164:40]
B
Whoever made narcos like I hope you listen to a lot of podcasts like this cuz the material bro. All right, the CN Fuegos Affair Inside the Case to Upended the Drug War in Mexico A Times Magazine ProPublica investigation reveals how the US painstakingly built a case against a Mexican general suspected of links to OC and then decided to let him go all right, let's read a little bit of this. So when the CN Fuegos family landed at Los Angeles International Airport on October 15, 2020, they looked excited and maybe a bit relieved. With the pandemic still ravaging Mexico, they had come to vacation in Southern Cal. Oh, vacation in Southern California, raging. Such a visit wasn't a problem, even on short notice. The patriarch, retired general Salvador C And Fuego Seda, had made powerful American friends during his six years as Mexico's defense minister. When he needed favor like visas for his wife, daughters and granddaughters, he could call someone at the Pentagon or the CIA. But as the family approached the passport line, an immigration officer waved them to the side. A trim, middle aged man dressed like the general in a black blue blazer and jeans, stepped forward and introduced himself in Spanish as a special agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Could he speak with the general privately? He asked. Two men crowded into a small office with several other law enforcement officers. There is a warrant for your arrest, sir, the agent said. This is a copy of the indictment against you. C and Fuegos wore a face mask with a clear plastic shield over it, but there was no hiding the confusion and anger. There must be some mistake, he insisted. Do you know oh, he hit him with the do you know what the agents did? For years, US Law enforcement intelligence agencies had been watching San Fuegos as he rose through the Mexican army, become defense minister in 2012. Since late 2015, the DEA had been investigating what it believed were CM Fuego's corrupt dealings with a second tier drug gang based in the small Pacific Coast State nay yard. In 2019, he had been secretly indicted on drug conspiracy charges by a federal grand jury in Brooklyn. I have worked with your CIA, C. And Fuegos protested. I have been honored by your Department of Defense. I understand, the DEA agent said. But you have still been charged. In the tumultuous days before the 2020 election, with COVID cases surging, President Donald Trump brainstorming and Senate Republicans rushing in to confirm a Supreme Court justice, the jailing of a retired Mexican general didn't make the front pages. Even in Los Angeles, it did make headlines in Mexico City. But President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico, who had long promised to vanquish the country's deeper, deeply rooted corruption, seemed to take the news and strike stride. Is a very regrettable fact that a former defense secretary should be arrested on charges of having ties to drug trafficking, he said the next morning. We must continue to insist, and hopefully this helps us understand that the main problem of Mexico is corruption. The US Law enforcement agencies have gone after Mexican officials before. Yada, yada, yada. C. Fuegos, though, was the most consequential Mexican official ever charged in US Court. Nearly two years into his retirement, he remained unusually influential, having groomed a generation of armed army leaders. And I'm remembering this case now, whatever became of this?
- [167:31]
A
So Amlo after that threw a fit.
- [167:34]
B
Yeah.
- [167:35]
A
And so the US just said, okay, we'll let him go if you guys investigate and investigate and then charge him. And the Mexican's like, I will investigate. And they let him go. That's why now I think this is where the. I think now in the second Trump administration, they're like, oh, hell no. Yeah, we're not going to do whatever you. Now you're not going that read this article like it's, it's. It's because. Why. The reason why I bring this up, though, is to your point, because I think a lot of people. Which is true. Right. When we're talking about. It's like, oh, the cartels corrupt the government. Which is true. But this case actually shows the other way around. And there's a. There's a great description here in which they're going after one of the leaders and he sends in the special forces to go after them. And when the cartel leader surrenders, he says. Says, I'm Thien Fuego's guy. I'm Thien Fogo's guy. What are you doing? And the Mexican special forces then just execute him on the spot based on this indictment.
- [168:29]
B
Whoa.
- [168:30]
A
And.
- [168:32]
B
And south of the border justice right there.
- [168:35]
A
And it's like, I think, you know what? I can probably if I remember, you can because there's a whole history where he lays it out. And I think it was blo if I'm not mistaken. I think it was Achedos who they were specifically than the upper do this control pull f And then put H2. Is there any interesting hold on
- [168:57]
B
the four brothers were key figures. H2 was about. Oh, it's got dash. That's why. So it says H2 was a volatile moon phase scarcely known outside of the regional underworld. Growing up on the outskirts of Mazatlan, the Caloa beach city. He became a secluded cario, or hitman for the Masset Lacos, a local gang closely affiliated with the Beltrons, and later emerged as a lieutenant to Hector Beltron. After the capo's arrest, H2 and his men were like orphans. A former Mexican official told me. H2 gathered his forces in Nieret estate, wedged among the narco strongholds of Caloa, Durango and Jalisco. He procured opium gum from Narit's eastern highlands and used blo can connections to ship heroin and other drugs into the United States. As far as Beck and his team could tell, the H's seemed to have no trouble with the Naira authorities. The task force acted cautiously on what it learned. The agencies one big drub shipment, but held back on actions that might jeopardize their surveillance. They sensed that they were on to an unusually good case. The H's were moving a lot of drugs and killing a lot of people. They were also careless in their communications. Even their dirty calls, those in which they discussed criminal activities, were rarely horrible. Hard to decipher.
- [170:11]
A
I'm trying to. There's actually. The video of the raid is out there, which is the B. The Blackhawk flying and shooting with the minigun. It's the first like, not the. There's one from Ovido Guzman that people mistook because there was a similar one, which was this guy. And I said, you can even maybe put. I mean, the flashy who's like, he. His hands up, dude. I'm. I'm telling you, this report is like. Because when you. When you read this, actually, there you go. Knew that the growing. Keep on going, keep on going, keep on going. Still a bunch when, when, when. When you read this, the article, the question then is who had the power in this corrupt relationship? Was it the drug leader or was it the general? And here you see it's the general. It's the general who has the power. And the politicians, to your point, have the power to tell the cartel, you're going to do this? Fine, we'll just kill you. So how do you solve that problem? Problem,
- [171:05]
B
I don't know. Because then it's like there's like a comparison in my head. I have, but it's not a perfect comparison, so I don't want to use that. But basically like where the buck stops. It's bad no matter what. One just has a shield and the other has a, you know, illegally purchased gun, if you will.
- [171:24]
A
Y.
- [171:25]
B
It's the Same end result.
- [171:26]
A
Yeah. And, and, and it's just that's why, why like, you know, you look at the corruption piece and again, I, I highly, highly recommend even say years ago this article, but it's just such a good investigation and you read it and when it comes out of it is was the infuego, the corrupt dude? I mean, was, was, was the blo guy achedos? Was he the one that controlled the general? Did the general control him? And so then how do you deal with that? Because when you're looking at this, and this is the irony of situation, when you're tracking cartels, you. You literally have to track, for example, okay, for example, the R5 Reyes, right? Los Reyes, the cartel, Los Unidos. Those military bases are known to support cartels Unidos against the Mexican, against cjng. We have footage from Michoacan, which is where Cartel Unidos is based out of, of members of the, of the cartel Sunidos. And back then like the police and even sometimes the military fighting side by side side against Kaluska. New generation cartel. So you see that that happens. So then how do you address these issues? And this is where the problem of the cartel, like, like solving the cartels, like especially where I think in Mento, for example, and Mayo became very powerful was in their idea of their power of corruption that they have and how they were able to influence Mexican politicians. Right. They were the top of the game. That's why I, I do believe that reporting that El Mento, that Claudia Shine was not aware of El M's operation until it was well, already in on its way. Right. And the vetted units were the ones that from that got intelligence from the US to go after this guy. But it, the question when you're analyzing Mexico is, is who is corrupt? Like who is it?
- [173:17]
B
Yeah.
- [173:17]
A
The assumption you should make is everybody in the Mexican political system is corrupt. And the question then becomes, are they corrupt because they're being beholden by the cartel or do they hold the cartel
- [173:25]
B
hostage and they happen to just be our biggest trade partner located right on our border. So it's not convenient.
- [173:32]
A
We don't. And that's the thing. Like how, like so you know, and then, and this is like, you know, I know we talk a lot about the drug trade, but again, you're like the oil, you know, who was heavily implicated in the oil theft and all that was. Well, it was the, the out in Mexico, in the Mexico side. It was the, the Mexican navy, a huge corruption scandal because the Mexican navy was Heavily involved in a lot of the oil.
- [173:53]
B
That's nice.
- [173:54]
A
And so. Right. And so, and, and, and I think one of the mottos. Because when you go to that map, I think one of the differences when you look at the map in comparison to. You were talking about narcos. Mexico. Right. Like the first season, what was it like? Water car. Yeah, let's send the Marijuana. Marijuana. What has fundamentally changed back then to now?
- [174:15]
B
Oh, it's not. They moved away from marijuana. They went to harder stuff.
- [174:19]
A
Well, to me it's. They went away from the transactional business and they went to the territorial business. Ah, that's why we see violence go up now.
- [174:27]
B
Can you extrapolate upon that?
- [174:29]
A
Yeah. So there's a great book. A good, a good, A good friend of mine, I talk to him regularly. He's a professor, Nathan P. Judge Jones. Great, great guy. And back all the way back in 2016, he wrote a book. Like, if there's one thing that helped me understand Mexican cartels. And look, if we can give him a shout out, his book, it's called Mexico Illicit Networks. So Nathan P. Jones book, you can Google it. Right. And, and he wasn't the first one to come up with it, but he really. That one, I, I from 2016. Right. So phenomenal book. Like, I've cited this so many times. Like, it's one of the books that helped me really frame my understanding of Mexican cartels that had a huge influence. Right. From being like, let's say doing this as a hobby to doing a little bit more professional to where I'm at. Like, this was it. In his book, he makes an argument that there's basically two types of cartels. And I wrote an article about this. It's called the Militarization of Drug Cartels in Mexico for a Newsline Institute. I wrote it. I heavily cited his work on that article. And it Basically, the argument is the transactional cartel is the Guadalajara cartel. We just want to get marijuana through. Right, let's. It's a business. Look, everything is a business, don't get me wrong. But it's more focused on the business model. The way they operate inside of Mexico is this transactional piece of moving drugs. And an example of that, for example, the quintessential perfect example of that is the Guadala cartel. Right? And that's where violence wasn't so bad. There's violence, don't get me wrong. But it's not what we see now. The territorial cartel, it's a different type of model and is exemplified by the Zetas and which it is, is that their whole business model centers on territorial control.
- [176:05]
B
Right.
- [176:05]
A
And that's how they make their money. Either the drug trade, extortion, you name it, or the passing through the plazas. My argument from this, because he wrote this in 2016, is what we've seen is a transition all the cartes. Because here he kind of talks about the Sinaloa cartel. Cartel in the federation still being transactional model. My argument is they've all kind of transitioned to at least at various degrees, but more so now a territorial focus. Like they're still transactional piece the drug trade, but the territorial control model is very important within that transactional business. So that's why what we see now is a militarization of the drug cartels.
- [176:41]
B
Right.
- [176:41]
A
That's because the territorial model emphasizes control, emphasizes maintaining that power, and you need that militarized force to do it.
- [176:49]
B
It's vertical integration, effectively. When you have acreage and state, you have more area to control and actually set up the stuff that's going to pay for the transaction part. I got it. Okay.
- [176:58]
A
And so that's why we see the drones now being as. That's why I have a huge problem when I'm talking to like some think tanks and stuff like that. They're like. And sometimes how they frame it is like, they frame it as, oh, it's a law enforcement problem. Oh, it's a. Yeah, it's crime. And it's like, do. How many do you want to. Do you want to join me in a session of watching decapitation videos and tell me this is a crime problem? Yeah, this isn't. It's. That has long passed.
- [177:22]
B
That's a think tank for you, sitting around in a room and air conditioning, talking about things happening thousand miles away.
- [177:28]
A
Yeah.
- [177:29]
B
Where heads are getting chopped like it's just a fucking statistic. Yeah. What else is new? But in the middle of all this, because, like, we've been alluding to it all day and we talked about it a little bit, is the story of the year, which is the fact that El Mencho.
- [177:42]
A
Yeah.
- [177:43]
B
Is dead. And like, we were talking about, I had Cat in here five days after she was walking through. Through the aftermath of what happened at his compound. And it's, It's. It's pretty clear that he is in fact dead. But the sketchiness of the operation and the staginess, if you will, of the scene is certainly questionable. And you have to wonder, like, what is the bigger picture here? What was really happening behind the scenes? So now we've had some time to let things settle in and more information to come out as best as you can tell. Tell who, like you said, Claudia shinebound was not notified of this until it was underway. So who was responsible for executing this and what really happened here?
- [178:26]
A
I, I, I think you know, it's those vetted units. If based on the Reforma report, which I do believe is true, because the question then like why now going after in mental. And I think the argument could be made that if it's that cl, let's say she authorized this. Like if you're going to make the argument that she authorized this operation, she was fully aware where the argument is. The reason why she do it now is because the Venezuela operation against Maduro, they're like one of the immediate after effects of this was oh, they can do this in Mexico.
- [178:56]
B
Right.
- [178:57]
A
We don't want that. That's the last thing we want is like Delta Force or Seal Team 6 or drone strikes or airstrikes inside of our country against drug members. Right. We don't want that. So the argument that is let's go after a mentor because he's the biggest fish, he's the big guy. If you can go, if we can show we can go after him. There's nobody that we can't go go after. There's nobody who's untouchable and Menu is the untouchable one. And so you can make that argument. I, I, so I think the issue was a lot of it from, from like that, that compound in that house that he was at with then Tapa. What, what happened was he was fleeing the area and he was executed more in the, in, like in the forest. I, I think they executed him. I mean like, I don't think they even gave him a shot to surrender. They.
- [179:35]
B
Yeah. You don't think he was dead before?
- [179:38]
A
I think that like he tried to
- [179:39]
B
flee because they were saying like he was on dialysis.
- [179:42]
A
You know, it's, yeah. So the elemental story is always very interesting that there's always was rumors before this that he was dead because of natural causes and dialysis and all that. No, I think, I think the Mexican and the reason why we also know that this wasn't necessarily Sages. I mean CJNG went on a war
- [179:57]
B
path afterwards for a day.
- [179:59]
A
Yeah. Still they killed, well, they killed what, 28.
- [180:02]
B
They killed a lot. But again that unfortunately, and I hate to say it this this way, unfortunately, that's a quick statistic.
- [180:08]
A
Correct. But it was still very significant even for, because I remember when we were Talking earlier in this episode when they do narco placades and I said, I kind of the exception is El Mento because they don't necessarily do it for retaliation. They do it to enable leader to get out here. They did it as retaliation. That's very interesting. They killed 28 Mexican National Guard soldiers afterwards. But obviously there's an understanding in the cdng that we can't do this long term. Right. Because a cartel is not there to replace the government. Government.
- [180:33]
B
Right.
- [180:33]
A
They're not. They need the government. Again, like when they get arrested, they need the government. Like hey judges.
- [180:39]
B
Well, if there's no government, you can't get arrested. That is the other argument.
- [180:43]
A
Well, but who are. They're not going to provide like water services to the people now. They'll do hearts and minds, but they're not going to run like the normal day to day government bureaucracy brought to
- [180:52]
B
you by the cartel.
- [180:53]
A
Exactly. Yeah. Sponsored by cjng. You know how that was in the, the, in the soccer games. But for Menel, right. When he was killed, the question then became okay, who's going to take over? Because the fact that his death is what caused all this violence to occur throughout Mexico. Because it literally happened in every single state that CG controlled. Right. And one of the arguments, for example Primito, how you can say cg because his territory in Reynosa Tamanipas also had narco blockades as a response bonds. So then the question then became because I do believe he was executed, who was going to take over? And there was really three, maybe four contenders. It was number one was always going to be 03. His top son. Who's. Who's an American citizen. Yeah, Santana. And it's. And he's. And what's very interesting about him is he comes from Los Quin family, the Gonzalez Valencia family, which. They're the money holders.
- [181:51]
B
Yep. Right.
- [181:52]
A
So you had O3. Who was the steps son? You had El Cardinero, El Sapo and then maybe, maybe Doble. Right. Who's the guy from Guanajuato? It really, it really was going to be 03. If you were going to put me a gun to my head and say who are the top three contenders? I was going to say 03 and then I was going to have a hard time if either Cardinalo Sapo, El Cardinero, if there's one man who can break CG&G and cause like a Caloa cartel so war and break off and do his own thing as Elardinero.
- [182:25]
B
Yeah, Right.
- [182:26]
A
Not El Sal Won't do that. I can see that.
- [182:28]
B
Why. Why do you say that?
- [182:29]
A
With him, he. His rise was very significant, very pronounced, and very, very well documented. And what was interesting is under him, he formed a very strong lieutenant named El Serio. El Serio. And that guy was starting to spread. He was in Guerrero, and then he was in CAR's base of operation was Nayari in Jalisco. And then you had. After the. The. The Chapito CJ alliance. Then he sent his guys to Caloa, and then he had his top lieutenant expanding Guerrero and Morales. Okay. Holy. That's a lot of places.
- [183:08]
B
That's a lot, right?
- [183:10]
A
And you can tell that he is ambition. He was an ambitious man. He was an ambitious man. And. And there was conversations after the Mental was killed. Was. Would Caro accept anybody but. But him? Well, I got a source, you know, short, I think. I think, like, less than a day after Edo was killed, a source of mine within CJNG told me, like, no, no, it's 03. He's. He's the leader. He's going to be the. He's the new leader. We're all understanding that he's the new leader of Halis New generation cartel.
- [183:37]
B
Text from like, who's the leader, fam?
- [183:39]
A
Literally. Literally. I was like, yo, man. Like, who is it? I have a tweet.
- [183:44]
B
Like, congratulations.
- [183:45]
A
Like, I. You could look up on a. Like the f. Like the. I literally tweeted it, like, the first one. And it was funny because after I tweeted it, like, everybody apparently, literally, like, copied and pasted kind of my. My tweet. We're like, so everybody has CG sources.
- [183:56]
B
Like, you got to be able to
- [183:57]
A
watermark the tweet because I told him, and it's from somebody that is reliable. I know. And he. He knows the inner workings of CGNG pretty well. Actually, he gave me a tip before the CG Chapitos video was coming out that they formally announced the alliance. He said, hey, there's a video coming. Coming out later today announcing this alliance. Being able to look at them, I think, like, six hours later is when I saw it. So that's why.
- [184:20]
B
Why does he want to tell you that?
- [184:22]
A
I. Because I think he. Because then it's like an influence game. Because then if I share his content, it's kind of like in a way where he can be like, see, I'm. I'm also important and influential within the organization. Just kind of, you know, you're just going to do it and, you know, you. But the many Aspects cartel members. But just like anybody, like why does somebody. Why do you have sources that pass you information?
- [184:39]
B
Right.
- [184:39]
A
And know just sometimes they. I'm not going to question it. I just have to validate it.
- [184:43]
B
Yeah.
- [184:45]
A
And so when O3 was announced as the leader, it was very interesting. There does appear to be an agreement. But again, the capture of Cardonero was like, I mean, I know they're after him. Maybe the US was going after him. The Mexicans are obviously going after him. He was a priority target. But was there like some additional intel that came out from a source that were like, we don't want to deal with C. We don't want to deal with El Cardino. We don't want to deal with him breaking off and doing his own thing. You know. And so that was a very interesting dynamic. But you know, the, the key thing about kis new generation cartel now is that the leader of it ot comes from los and what's important about the Queen. When I say we're going to control the money, I don't think people understand what I mean by that. They control the money.
- [185:33]
B
Yeah.
- [185:33]
A
Please explain.
- [185:34]
B
Explain Rockefellers.
- [185:37]
A
If you were to grab every single Mexican peso and dollar that the Queenies have ever touched in in. In Mexico and you were to remove it out of the Mexican financial system.
- [185:51]
B
Bye bye.
- [185:51]
A
The Mexican economy collapses overnight. Yep. There's a reason why when people say go after the money like he just said that. Look at the sanctions that the US has imposed on Mexican financ financial institutions. I think the total value is less than $15 billion. That's a joke. We're not going to go after the actual finance all them. We can't collapse the Mexican. To your point, they're our largest trading partner.
- [186:12]
B
That's right. We're not going to do that us up.
- [186:14]
A
We're not. No, that's, that's. It's insane. Like wake up, people. Go after the money. It's easier said than done. You cannot touch the queen's money that well. And El Quini, the El Quini is sitting in U.S. prison. Right. But that family has always controlled the money. And so now the stepson. The reason why El Mencho is probably as powerful as fur he is is because of Elin's mom wife who comes from that family. And now the interesting aspect, the CG is now under the. So the guy El Mencho controlled the guns and the Quinis controlled the money. El Mento was always the top dog. Don't get me wrong. He wasn't necessarily running the day to day that was actually more 03. He was the one who was running the day to day and many. That's the suspicion. Suspicion. But there was an interesting dynamic which is that was he losing influence to El Cardinero, for example, or even El Sapo that they can challenge him? Clearly not. But now we have cj. The guy who controls the gun and the guy who controls the money is the same person. It's the same family now.
- [187:11]
B
So now it's. Would you say it's. They're in a healthy position as a cartel organization post El Mencho. They've gone through the hardest days of like a post leadership change.
- [187:24]
A
At this point, I think, I think the worst case scenario has already passed them. I think the hardo aspect is very interesting. The fact that after Elardo was captured, another cg, the source of mine from CJ told me Elio and another guy, one of his cousins, but really Elio is. Took control of Elardo's overall faction. So he's now in charge. But he's not at the level of a Caro. Right. There's no dispute that he's not at the same level. And so I think those are the, the aspects. I know we were talking this off air like the El like people. It's like, okay, when.
- [187:59]
B
Because after he was fun too.
- [188:01]
A
He was, you know, he's still active. He's very active. So it's very funny because I, I remember saying Elud caught my attention because he's always was based out of Mitan after Mencho was captured. For some, I think it started as a joke and people ran with it that he was going to be the new leader. CJ's like, like, no, no, ladies and gentlemen, no, he's not. He's not even top 10 most powerful in Mexico. Right. Elaco, another name in Michoacan, is more influential than yogurt. But what's very interesting about a yogurt is he started out in Michoacan and then he started, he, he expanded his operations in Quintana Ro and Kosumel, which is like the opposite coast. Like wait, Michaan, Kintana, Rosumel, Cancun. Okay, that's interesting. Like way out there, right, Jerry, Generally how factions work, they're like, they're connected. Then there was, there was reporting that he was also he. Outside a base of operation in Colima. Okay, Colima Mitra Khan. That makes sense. Sure. That's interesting. When shortly after the Chapito lines was announced and Cardinero went in and I Actually remember talking this in another episode and Hardino went in. One of the things I started to notice was is this a situation where Cardinero is getting too much power because he. Not only does he control Nayarit and Jalisco and now through his subordinates Guerrero and now possibly Morelos later on, but now he's active in Sinaloa with Los Chapitos. What was interesting there was reporting from accounts based on Michoacan de Yogurt was sent to Sinaloa. And what caught my attention was I kind of speculated, did they do that because they didn't want. Want Hardinero to be the only one that controls the whole Sinaloa cartel civil war fight. So they put somebody else in there to be like, yeah, yeah, we're. We're finding, you know, we're both Generation Guard to help us. Hey, Yogurt. No, no, no. You're also going to be very active. And the, and, and some of the reporting I got is that his fighters are actually concentrated in Kulakan. One of his factions called, I think it's called the D17, they're very much centered in Kulakan, which is the capital. Like that's the Chapito's heartland. And so it's kind of like this. Almost like you can make this argument like, like this Praetorian Guard in a way, but in a way to tell the Cardino guys, like, no, no, no, we're here. What's interesting about yo is that him and Primito, the other guy was saying, hate each other, despise each other. And I think the reason is so
- [190:14]
B
their factions obviously hate each other too.
- [190:16]
A
I. I mean, obviously not going to say it vocally on. On. On Instagram. I think from a leadership. And I think the reason why is because I think Yogurt, again, who's not in the contender of the top leader. I think the interesting aspect is Primitos influence within Color Schooner Generation Cartel is that personal relationship with adventure. But even before he was killed, they hated each other. And I think the reason why Primito hated him was because Yogurt was rising in power. But he was able to do that outside of deploying his forces. I mean, because he was deploying his forces not through personal relation. What was interesting is El Metro then deployed forces to Zakateca us to support El Sapo. And so it's all these internal cartel dynamics, specifically within Hos Generation Cartel that you can see how it can get very complicated is in. In with El Mental. It can kind of break Down. But luckily for O3, it's kind of stabilized and stayed the same, seeing as
- [191:11]
B
we just saw for the first time an administration in the United States declare the cartels a, you know, a terrorist threat and organization which allows them to legally, potentially do something. Some other interesting things down there, you know, we haven't seen an all out war happen from the United States against these organizations there, despite the powers that they've now granted themselves. So I ask you, sitting in here in 2026 with another, I guess, two and a half years in this administration, do you think that the abilities of the United States government that have now been temporarily at least granted to them by declaring these organizations terrorist organizations will have put a major, major damper on the power that these organizations have in Mexico by the time Trump leaves office in 2029.
- [192:08]
A
If it continues as we're seeing now and the only strikes we're seeing is against these like speedboats, then no.
- [192:15]
B
So in what scenario would it make, make a, a big impact?
- [192:23]
A
I mean, that's the thing. I mean, it's like from, I mean, I, look, I, I don't want, I don't want to. The reason why we do like the King K strategy and the military strategy because really it's the only tool that we have available to do and it's to do something and even the Mexicans do and they have to do it again. It's like, oh, go after the money. Again, easier said than done. I mean, I think the, I think from, if you're, if you're analyzing this from a terrorism declaration perspective and it's just that, then no, if you start combining that with severe targeting of Mexican corruption, now we're talking which would include
- [192:56]
B
like some sort of sanctioning in the financial system or things of those and
- [193:02]
A
targeting the leadership of Mexico, like the political leadership. Right. The problem in Mexico is the most effective anti corruption body in Mexico is the Southern district of New York. That, that's away from Mexico, but the Mexicans aren't going to solve it. So do you force them to take that into consideration? Look, look, I think at the end of the day, what I would say, I think the best case scenario we can look at and a lot of people have said this is the best case for Mexico, it ends up like Colombia. You're not going to eliminate them. But we reduce the violence. It's manageable. You know, now cocaine production in Colombia skyrocketing, causing problem. But that's obviously a thing with President Petro. But can you get a situation where maybe that's reduced. But in the situation, Columbia is kind of somewhat more manageable and you're really interdicting drugs, etc. Right. I think that's the best case that you can look at for Mexico is the military, the conduit to do it. I mean, there's certain. I mean, look, the Mexicans are doing, the Cadorians are doing, the Colombians do it. Everybody does it. Everybody uses the military to go after it in many aspects. You do have to go out, you have to utilize the military. Because Mexican cartels, the last estimate we have control at least fully, fully control. 33% of Mexico's under cartel absolute control. That's just like them controlling the territory. No government, no nothing. They control a third of Mexico now. Let's expand that if with strong influence. Where you see gunmans of cartel members side by side with the police.
- [194:16]
B
Yeah.
- [194:17]
A
You know, so you can look at it and say it's like, okay, there's wait, now again, the drug strikes against drug boats. I don't think it's necessarily going to damp it. What you're going to encourage is I think what we see in what we saw in Spain, that's, you know, but now they're going to put in container vessels. We've already started to see that as well. So, you know, it causes problem, but you can weaken it. Is it going to be done in two years? That's for me, it's kind of hard to see. Is it possible? Sure, sure. But just as the Mexican cartels kind of took over the Colombian cartels, if you want to say who I think might take over at the Mexican cartels weekend, from a global, international perspective is the Brazilian gangs.
- [194:53]
B
Oh, we can't even touch that right now, dude. We're three hours minutes in. But that's for the next one. That's a whole. The Brazilian gangs are no joke, man.
- [195:02]
A
Finally, finally, the Wall Street Journal. Because I've been screaming this through the top of my lungs for a long time, the Wall Street Journal wrote a great article about, about that. Like specifically pcc, but PCC and Red Commando are the two ones that I would be looking at that can. Just as Sinaloa Cartel and CG are not only the most powerful Mexican drug cartels in Mexico, they're the most powerful criminal organizations in the world. If they start getting weekend, the ones that I would be looking at are the Brazilian games led by the two. Those are the two. Yeah.
- [195:31]
B
That's a whole different ball game right there. Stephano, you're awesome, man. You're a great follow on X. I always say Twitter, but X as well. And anything else you want linked down there, let me know so that people can find you wherever you are. But we're gonna have to do this again, my friend.
- [195:44]
A
Awesome. Thank you so much. It was great.
- [195:45]
B
All right, everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you.