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The Underworld Podcast
Jalisco’s Death Camp, El Salvador's Mega-prison and Mexico’s Cartel Extraditions
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- [00:01]
Will Grant
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Sean Williams
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Will Grant
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- [01:01]
Sean Williams
It's the afternoon of September 18, 2024, just outside Guadalajara. A convoy of white National Guard pickups hurtle towards the Isagiri Ranch in the town of Teochitlan, an unassuming spot three buildings in size, buried in the middle of a sugarcane plantation lined with dusty palm trees. The first clue something isn't right is is the ranch's black pig iron gate pocked with bullet holes. But the officers knew it wasn't right. Already, a tip has come in from a local group, the Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco, an NGO dedicated to finding friends and relatives disappeared in the country's brutal drug war. And the tip is solid because as the officers arrive on the scene, they come under gunfire. The officers burst in. The guys inside aren't up for a fight, and they surrender quickly. Inside, they find assault rifles, handguns, grenades, tactical vests, vehicles and narcotics. The officers free two captive men, but they also find a body. Its hands are tied, and it seems to have been executed. At best, this place is some kind of training camp, and it's linked to the cartel Jalisco Nueva Geracion, or cjng, the second most powerful cartel in Mexico and feared as its most violent. At worst, this place is one where the cartel carries out its most horrific acts unseen. And the dozen arrestees are young. Really young. The CJNG was recruiting young people to train them into the ranks of organized crime at the ranch, says Daniel Espinosa Likon, president of Jalisco's Supreme Court. Those arrested are, quote, charged with false disappearance and homicide, adds Licon. An expert tells media that the youths at Teochitlan were likely among those kidnapped at random by the CJNG and forced into cartel work. They are kept in safe houses without communication and awaiting varied assignments, says Jorge Ramirez, a member of the university Committee for the Analysis of Disappearances. Some are put in charge of preparing doses for drug dealing. Some become sicarios. Others are deployed into conflict zones as poorly trained combatants. Rumor has it, he adds, some of these boys are forced to fight each other, sometimes with knives and sometimes to the death. Jalisco holds one of Mexico's most dubious titles. Of the nation's 32 states, it has the most disappeared people, over 15,000, and that is a low number. But after the discovery at Teochitlan, Jalisco's state governor denies there's a crisis of disappearances. The officers leave the ranch and the story is like so many surrounding Mexico's drug cartels, dies. But the buscadores aren't done. At the beginning of March 2025, they head back to Isagiri and they start digging. Pretty soon they've unearthed what seems to be a clandestine crematorium. They find human remains, 200 pairs of shoes, discarded clothes, backpacks, nail polish, toothbrushes, even kids toys. Suddenly, the Iseguide Ranch looks less like a training facility than a death camp, and locals dub it the Mexican Auschwitz. How did an entire battalion of National Guard officers miss this? This is a mockery. One of the buscadores cries on a later visit to the site. The only truth is that they don't care about the missing. Another rummages through the ranch's debris and grabs a few socks, a gold handled razor and an Adidas bag. This, they say sarcastically, holding the items up to journalists, is how they search for clues. It's one of the grimmest discoveries in Mexico's history. What happens next will decide the fate of the disappeared, their loved ones, the cjng, and the country's popular, energetic president, Claudia Schoenbaum. Is the Helisco Horror Ranch Mexico's Auschwitz really enough to turn the tide against the cartels? Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. Hello and welcome again to the podcast that takes you around the world of criminals and their ill gotten gains. I am Sean Williams in New Zealand and I'm joined today not by Danny Gold, but by will Grant, the BBC's Mexico, Central America and Cuba correspondent who's been on the ground in Jalisco so Rancho Isaguire and can tell us about the discovery, what it means going forward in the fight against organized crime there. And Will is also the author of Populista the Rise of Latin America's 21st century strongman. And we're going to talk about the many connections between politics in the region there and gangsters. And as we speak, Will has just returned from a trip to El Salvador where he visits Secot, which if you haven't listened to our show ever before, you won't know that it's the mega prison established by Nai Bukele to House Ms. 13 and Barrio dies Ocho gangsters but has since been well, is moonlighting for another reason as well. Thanks to Washington D.C. so to say the least, there is a lot for us to talk about. Thanks for joining me, Will. First, how can I get your job? And second, where are you joining us from?
- [07:05]
Will Grant
Hi Sean, it's a real pleasure to be with you. My job's not currently up for grabs because I wouldn't let it slip from my fingers for the time being. I'm joining from Mexico City where I'm primarily based now as the regional correspondent for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. And yeah, that does take me to places like El Salvador. It takes me up to the US Mexico border a fair amount. There's plenty going on in Mexico City itself, of course, and it's an interesting spread. I mean this is a unique time I think in terms of sort of Central American relationships with the United States and you know, obviously through the prism of migration on the one hand but crime obviously that we've talked and going to talk about and the second Trump administration really beginning to get its feet under the table. So yes, it's an interesting, interesting gig, no doubt about it. And, and Mexico is never, never a boring place to be, to be based.
- [08:02]
Sean Williams
No, not at all. And what was it around three to four weeks ago? You're in Jalisco reporting on the, the ranch and, or the so called horror ranch out there. Really grim discovery. People have called it Mexico's Auschwitz for good reason. I mean the sort of visuals coming out of the place are pretty awful. What did you kind of get a sense of what this place was when you were out there? I think it was first described as a training camp back in September. Cops obviously, for reasons known slash unknown, didn't decide to take it further. And now the theory is that it was a, it was a training camp for young sort of blackbirded conscriptees right into the CJNG and sort of Almost like a spartan death camp, really.
- [08:49]
Will Grant
Yeah. I mean, the implications of what it could be make your blood run cold. There's, as you say, in the Mexican media, they've spoken of everything from an extermination camp through to kind of ovens where people are being. Their body. Their body is being disposed of. Sort of, yeah, kind of gladiator style fights to the death between recruit, you know, forced recruits. All of these things unfortunately seem possible in a narrative because we know they've happened elsewhere, particularly in San Fernando, in Tamaulipas in 2010. The testimony that was eventually pulled together from the massacres that took place there of migrants. Forced migrant. Forced recruitment of migrants and the massacre of migrants were so shocking. Now, that was by the setas, but of course, that has sort of set the standard of brutality, if you like, in Mexico. So nothing is beyond belief at the same time. So therefore it's a very eerie sort of a place. Of course, when you go there, there is a security presence, there's local police, there's federal police, there's. There is National Guard, there are forensic teams that's, you know, you sort of saw all of those different entities at once on. On the space, and you. We at least couldn't get further than the cordon. We, you know, we took the normal amount of time it takes to sort of scramble to a story to get up there, but by that time, just not letting journalists in. When they did let journalists in, it was on very much on a guided tour. And so the majority of the images we've seen are either in that very first period before they set up that cordon, or by the Buscadores themselves, that is the search teams of victims, families, members, who literally were doing Facebook lives as they walked in. Those guys tend to know what they're looking at. They have a lot of experience looking at very, very small, sad, tragic and frightening spaces in Mexico. Mass graves, shallow graves, as you say, recruitment centers. Places that have been used for the murder, torture and abuse of victims and of young people on a massive scale. And so the tendency is, I think, to give, or at least among Mexican society and a lot of journalists is to give them the benefit of the doubt when they say this is what they've found and this is what it looks like to them. And of course, who can dispute the 200 pairs of shoes, which is just such a chilling image. Hundreds of pieces of clothes, scores of rucksacks. You know, where is all this stuff come from? Who does it belong to and where are they? All very Disturbing questions to ask and very hard to know exactly what the answers are, particularly when we're talking about a group like the New Generation Haliskill Cartel. I think we're going to see in the coming days and weeks exactly what the Attorney General's spin on all this will be. Already we've seen Omar Harfouch, who's the secretary of the Security Secretary, begin to indicate that his investigations or his team's investigations suggest that it's not an extermination site, which, you know, is setting certain alarm bells ringing among those groups of victims families. We will wait and see what the Attorney General's office say, particularly on that point that you made about this was taken over by the local authorities. It was closer, as I say, you know, shut up. And why then was the sort of depth of the violence that appears to have taken place there not revealed? Why did they simply, you know, free a couple of people who are being held hostage in there, make, I think, 10 arrests? And that's where the whole scene thing seemed to seem to end, you know.
- [12:39]
Sean Williams
Yeah, and it's interesting to hear. My deutsche brain is always saying Scheinbaum, but it's Shanebourne or something, isn't it?
- [12:47]
Will Grant
I think Shane Baum is what you say over here. Shane Baum.
- [12:50]
Sean Williams
Shane Baum. Okay. So Claudia Scheinbaum, she seems to have kind of broken tack with AMLO and previous administrations who were trying to tamp down these kind of discoveries or at least kind of running cover for various federal agencies that were sort of implicated or at least suggested to have ignored some of the sort of darker things going on at such sites. So there is noise that the Mexican government wants to do something about this. What are the Buscadores saying? What are sort of state governments saying? What's the general sort of conversation going on around this right now?
- [13:29]
Will Grant
Well, what's interesting is, yes, she is trying to sort of make a bit of a cleft between herself and her predecessor, although, of course, he's her political mentor. So she doesn't want to throw under the bus or be seen to be throwing him under the bus. I think that's been interesting, the way that she's been handling that dynamic so far in her first 100, 150 days of government. I saw, and we all saw how quickly the state governor came out and said, you know, we are at the full disposition of Claudia Shane Ballon and her government. And, you know, we applaud her for the action she's taking sort of language. They're from different parties, but apparently there is a decent amount of sort of mutual respect there. So I think that we will see an effort to kind of come up with some kind of collective narrative that they're all happy with, because this is reasonably easy for him, the local governor, to put it on the governorship before him. You know, he was very quick to say this didn't take place on my watch or on the watch of Claudia Scheinbaum. But, you know, we are absolutely nobody in Jalisco is washing their hands was the line he used. So I think quite clearly the Buscadores are going to want some proper question answered, some proper answers to, you know, to those questions of why then when did the state authorities went in to get over? Was nothing revealed? Why was there no effort to investigate further? Why was it essentially, you know, kind of taken over and no more conclusions drawn? So I think there's going to be a lot of skepticism from what the official version of events comes out to be. Unless it is kind of part of the narrative they want to hear. This has the potential to be quite sticky. I think what Claudia Shane Bounds doing is, you know, this is clearly one that moved Mexicans, that moved international kind of viewers and readers. It was just so shocking. And the Mexican drug war, unfortunately, it's so constant. It's such a constant mood music to the problems in this country is that. Is that it has a tendency to no longer shock. But this one did, this one sort of broke through because of the haunting image of all the shoes and so on. So I think she was wanting to be seen right from the get go, to not be hiding anything, to be as open as she can to tell people to act, to get the fiscalia, the Attorney General's office to take control because the State Attorney's General's office couldn't be trusted, and so on and so forth. So thus far, and I'll only put it that, that way, she seems to be handling it quite well. But we'll have to see what the final conclusions are. You know, how they go down with the general population, how they go down with the Buscador is and what their sense is, I think, of what the sort of excuses of how this situation came around are. You know, will there be arrests? We've seen that there's been a few already, detentions of local police officers, I believe. But, you know, I think some real scrutiny will be wanted about, you know, how on earth could this situation have unfolded in the first place?
- [16:58]
Sean Williams
Have we heard any more about the 10 guys who they arrested on site Back in September at all. They definitely affiliate with the cjng. Have they been speaking to authorities at all?
- [17:09]
Will Grant
I don't have any kind of updates on that. My understanding was that there was nothing particularly out the ordinary when these arrests are made. You know, they were just, just that kind of, you know, we found this space, you know, it was a recruitment center. We made these arrests and that's sort of where it all ended. So I can't give you any answer on that with any definitive, you know, clarity. I did see that the arrests made subsequently were of people related to the police force, which, you know, tells us just the insidious nature in places like Jalisco and Tamar Leipas, previously with the Setters and so on and so forth, the nature in which these aren't separate entities where things are extremely tough in terms of the drug war and the role of organized crime in state apparatus and vice versa. And I remember understanding that better than ever, right around the date actually of the San Fernando attacks. We were in Tamaulipas. We were looking at the role of the setters in the state, and we spoke to, to the girlfriend of one of the setups. And she had, you know, lived through a very, very, very tough experience with this partner and obviously shadow her face and change her identity, change her voice and all this stuff. And at one point she's explaining to me, you know, just the relationship that her partner had by day as a policeman and by night as a, as a, as a member of the SECAs, as it were. And I said, so you're telling me that this is a very, very close relationship. I was quite new to Mexico at the time. I said, it's very close relationship. She's saying, no, no, no, it's one and the same thing. And you know, I remember the hairs on the back of my neck sort of, you know, standing up. We're in this nondescript hotel room and we're filming all a bit, you know, a bit undercover, as it were. And that's never left me that sense in which that, you know, when the institutions are co opted by organized crime in Mexico, they really are much one and the same thing. Not that it's just a close relationship. We're talking about the very mayors and, you know, the local government, the local police and so on, actually being the narcos, not working for the narcos. So, you know, that is one of the considerations I think, in a situation like this is that the two things are, you know, intertwined. Really.
- [19:44]
Sean Williams
Yeah, it's pretty terrifying. From the. The episode that you mentioned in Tamaulipas in 2010, then what can we infer if we're to believe that this was a training camp for sort of forced recruits?
- [19:58]
Will Grant
I think there's quite a lot of likelihood that that that has been going on because I was in Tijuana recently and we were there around Donald Trump's inauguration and his decision to basically bring the kind of curtain down immediately on CBP1. The this is the app which allows a legal pathway into the United States by which people can make their asylum requests. So literally, minutes after he took office, you know, swore the oath of office, all of those people who had appointments through CBP1 found that they'd been just indefinitely cancelled. And I spoke to this one young man in a hostel who, sorry, in a. Yeah, a sort of refuge specifically for people who were fleeing violence and fleeing credible fear that he was from Michoacan. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law, not available in all states.
- [21:27]
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- [21:54]
Will Grant
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- [24:40]
Sean Williams
It's. It's insane that something as malevolent and horrible as this would, would carry on in any way. I mean, you can imagine in, you know, pretty much any country on earth that this would be not only the top news every single day, but it would be top of the list of any politician. You would have task forces going out to stop it. I mean, how. How has it persisted? Is it just because of that intertwining between the cartels and, and the political system?
- [25:10]
Will Grant
So, without wanting to make a seamless segue into the next part that we're going to talk about, but naive Bukele in El Salvador, who's obviously turned around a gang situation in his nation through Tactics that of course have huge human rights questions and violations that human rights organizations are extremely worried about and have decried time and again putting those human rights questions to one side just momentarily. Nobody I don't think can deny that it's changed El Salvador, you know, completely. So on this latest trip I was in the 10th of October, the dies doctor neighborhood that was run by the MS.13. It was extreme, extremely dangerous neighborhood to go to. You couldn't go in without express permission from the, from, from the gang leadership first and if you did you may well not come back out. And there I was just pottering around the place, chatting to shop owners. There was three soldiers with long arms standing in the shade of a tree. All of the gang graffiti now painted over in, you know, nice shades of green and pink and just completely different feel to a neighborhood. Yes, there's still real reticence of young of some people to talk about what life was like. And one knows that of course there's still going to be some vestiges of organized crime there or to some extent the police have replaced, you know, that it's not a paradise, but that it has changed significantly is undeniable. Now of course, you know, not saying for a second the ends justify the means, but it is true that it. These places are very, very different, these communities are very, very different. And he waded in recently on the Mexican question and the difficulty of Mexico to actually get control of these things. And his argument was that it sort of starts at a lower level that people say to him, well Mexico is much bigger, it's 120 million people. You can't possibly compare, you know, to how small El Salvador is. And he was saying, well El Salvador is the size of some of the states, states in Mexico. And you could start with the state. And if you're not being successful in taking over organized crime, it's because organized crime not only is stronger than the state, it's part, it is the state. The state has been co opted. I think that certainly got a lot of backs up in Mexico among the government, among Claudio Shanebaum's administration to have obviously a sort of maverick libertarian, conservative politician, populist kind of saying that Mexico really just hasn't done, done things properly in order to get this situation under control. And it is obviously his perspective. It's quite a facile analysis on one level. The truth of the matter is that Mexico's problems in organized crime and cartel control go way beyond Mexico's borders. They go certainly deeply into the United States. They run all the way down to the Andes. This isn't, you know, they run to China, the provider of precursor chemicals for the production of fentanyl. The demand for the, for the drugs lies in the United States. The money is generated there. It is hidden around the world through intermediaries. The guns, as we know, and I'm sure you've talked about extensively on the podcast over the years, come from the US down south. Something that the Shamebaum administration has been at pains to point out to Donald Trump over and again. So, you know, I think that it was a sort of nice attempt, if you like, by Nai Bulkele to say, look, if I can do it here, you can certainly do it in Jalisco. But it isn't, it doesn't, it sort of deliberately overlooks to an extent the, the depth of the problem that Mexico faces because of the fact that some of these institutions and apparatus of the state are compromised and because it's been a very, very long time and there's huge amounts of money involved and some of the weaponry is of military level. You know, not to downplay the strength of the MS.13 or the 18th street gang or anything that they were facing in El Salvador, but I would argue, and I think a lot of people would, would suggest the Sinaloa cartel or, or the, you know, the, the New Generation cartel are, are very different beasts that the Gulf Cartel are, you know, are much more powerful and, you know, bigger international criminal organizations. They're more than, as it were, a Central American street gang.
- [29:56]
Sean Williams
Yeah, yeah. These are multinational corporations essentially with tentacles in every country on earth. And what, hundreds of billions of dollars going through the books, wherever the books are going through. I don't know, Swiss bank accounts or Chinese intermediaries or wherever they might be. But this camp, this ranch and the fallout from it, I mean, it's not only captured the imagination of the international media, but it also seems to have caused a huge amount of outrage. I mean, I'm thinking about Ayotinapa in 2014, when the students were 43 students massacred with the express will of forces there. This kind of level of outrage must go beyond Jalisco, beyond, beyond local reporting. I mean, it must be. This has to. Something has to happen. Surely on the back of this, the images are just crazy.
- [30:52]
Will Grant
I think the IoT snapper example is a good one because it did cross my mind a lot when I was, when I was at the ranch and in Jalisco in general, the comparisons. And there are these moments in which these specific events are just so Horrific that they do, as it were, capture the national imagination and beyond, you know, that has been reported on around the world. And then there is this clamor for something to be done. I mean, the size of the protests around the 43 at the time here in Mexico City, let alone, you know, locally as well, were huge. There was a national clamor for action. And Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador promised to take action and to sort of get them justice, and then left office six years later with them very, very angry at him. He left office just a couple of days after the 10th anniversary of what happened. It was interesting to me, as we spoke to parents of those of the 43, that they were outright angry at AMLO, that he had not delivered on a campaign promise as far as they were concerned. And here we are back again, yet more promises from another administration. We'll just have to see if this time they're telling the truth. It was that kind of a sense. One wonders with this if it will just fall into the sort of pantheon of awfulness that has taken place. I mean, I think the 43 is so emblematic because it unfolded one night, you know, and it was very clear that these people, these young men and women, had been taken somewhere and had been killed. And then the question is, who? And, and, and, and how did the state or the state authorities cover this up, as the accusation goes? And, you know, subsequently, why is there no clarity? Why is it still being obfuscated and hidden? And why can't we get to the heart and publicly about exactly what happened here and the role of the military and so on and so forth, you know, whereas in this case, it's more a series of question marks. You know, there's the remains of. There's bone fragments, there's there's clothes. Who do those clothes belong to? How can the families who are looking for their loved ones and know perfectly well what they were wearing the day they just disappeared access those clothes to be able to identify, can we link these things with proper DNA testing of the many thousands, tens of thousands of mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers who are looking for their loved ones? Right. So it's a slightly different thing in the fact that, as it were, we don't have any bodies. We just have this just frightening sight that nobody really yet knows what it is. And as I say, I think that the next hurdle will be when the state says, or rather, you know, the Mexican government says, okay, these are our conclusions about what this is, and this is what happened, and we'll have to Just see how far that ties in with what the victims families are saying they're found. And I think a lot of Mexicans are very sympathetic to what the victims families are saying they're found and they're saying they found an extermination site and they want to know what happened there. So, you know, if they turn around and say, look, most of these clothes were dumped there, we're not sure that there were people that, you know, that's going to be really difficult. I'm not suggesting that is what they're going to conclude. But if it had that's that sense, you know, of a, of some form of COVID up or some form of, you know, lack of clarity, then I think, I think people will be very, very, very angry about that. Yeah, I think it will end up being one of those sort of test cases a bit, you know, one of those points of reference in the Mexican drug war that people go back to.
- [34:34]
Sean Williams
It's hard to see how Shane Baum can react to any of this without triggering more violence as well. Right. Because these are essentially small private armies. I mean, you've seen what happened in the, in the fallout of Mayo Sambada's capture. Ongoing sort of war, levels of violence in some parts of Michoacan as well. I mean, how does the state actually try to flush these cartels out without triggering a sort of full scale conflict really internally?
- [35:06]
Will Grant
And I think it's an extremely good question because up until now, the head on approach of taking on cartels and leaving huge numbers of bodies all over the place on both sides, firefights hasn't worked. The approach by Andre Manuel Lopez Obrador that always got reduced to this shorthand of hugs not guns, which, you know, hugs not bullets, sorry. Which was a way of saying we need to do a more holistic approach of sort of helping young people find reasons to not join the cartels and stuff was always dismissed by people as not working because you know, so many people were still being killed during his six years in power. It feels like in a sense nothing has worked well so far. If you take out just the heads of the organization, then another one grows in its place. You know that these are multi headed hydras to say the least. So what, what does one do? You know, how, how do you take on such powerful organizations? I think there are methods, there are people better placed than me to talk about them. But you know, I think the stuff that has worked well is on the one hand hurting them financially, so attacking them very, very hard on those like you mentioned these middlemen and the financial flows of money which can be tracked. And you know that, that there is a. Is a way to, to start shutting down operations. You can work harder on stopping the, the influx of chemicals and things from, from China and stopping the precursor chemicals for fentanyl ever getting here. They are incredibly adaptable, incredibly powerful, incredibly brutal. So it is one of the great intractable problems in terms of sort of making sure the civilian population aren't hurt. That's where one starts asking the question of is it about negotiating with them? And of course then that's politically extremely tricky because there's probably very few administrations through some way or another haven't negotiated, spoken to the cartels because, you know, you have to have some form of discussion. So it said how that happens and through what back channels, you know, is, is open to interpretation and what exactly is being agreed. Again, I'm sorry, this all sounds quite opaque, but I think that's because the process itself is very murky. And of course no politician wants to say they are openly in negotiation with the cartels. And of course, in years gone by, the sort of romanticized image of the gentleman cartel, you know, the, the, the, the sort of.
- [37:48]
Sean Williams
Yeah, the gentleman bandit kind of.
- [37:50]
Will Grant
That's it, exactly. Yeah, the gentleman criminal who wouldn't turn their guns on the civilian population. You know, sort of, there was a, a respect almost for the state to a certain point, but of course that's all dissolved. And particularly with groups like, you know, the more sanguine, the more, you know, bloodthirsty groups, the settlers and so on of this world, then that long dissolved because, you know, they simply weren't interested in adhering to anything the state had to say. So, you know, the limits of the state's control over organized crime became very, very clear. And in fact, organized crime was in charge. I honestly don't know how they build it back. And I think if anybody does say they do know, then either they're absolute experts in this stuff or you know, or they know of some successes that I, that I don't. I would, I would put it this way. I think that one of the problems that Mexicans see in the Mexico's own drug war or observers people here in Mexico see is that so often it doesn't seem very joined up the thinking that it's not always from the element of dissuading young people to join the ranks, giving people reasons to not be attracted by the concept of organized crime. So therefore poverty alleviation, education, all of these things as well as cracking down, as well as arresting key leaders, as well as stopping chemicals coming in, as well as stopping financial flows of money, preventing guns from coming south, you know, just reducing the space in which they can operate in every level through both, you know, soft and hard approaches. I think if there was an administration that could show that it was doing that and it was having success in doing that, that would be celebrated. But you know, so far it was very piecemeal that success is coming kind of ad hoc. Almost like we've done this and that's led to this. We've managed to, I don't know a rest El Chapel. But you know, it doesn't mean that the Sinaloa cartel isn't still going to be a huge consideration going forward. You know what I mean?
- [40:02]
Sean Williams
Yeah. And it's pretty crazy time for all this to be happening considering that three of the cities are going to be hosting the World cup in, in like a year's time. Hopefully I'll get out there as well. So that'll be quite fun. But because you saw these incredibly heavy handed approaches to combating crime in Rio, for example, before the World cup there, there is usually some kind of heavy handed scandal ahead of a, ahead of a World Cup. It's just huge. I mean, I would assume what, hundreds, thousands, if not millions of people are going to be coming to Mexico just either to watch the games or just to hang out while they're happening. They've got to do something, right? I mean, they can't just keep this narrative going until, until that happens.
- [40:45]
Will Grant
So I mean, Guadalajara itself, which will be one of the host cities as well as Monterrey in the north and Mexico City is quite safe, but of course it's based in Jalisco, which is not safe. So yeah, it will be a huge consideration. And of course this is sort of the NAFTA World Cup. It's Mexico, US and Canada. You can't really think of three nations who are more kind of in conflict at the moment over tariffs and, and so on. The idea of Donald Trump being the co host with neighbors both to the north and to the south, there's talk of more tariffs being introduced very shortly. Each time they're put on the table, they manage to sort of stave them off, but eventually he's either going to follow through on them because it makes him look weak to constantly threaten them and not impose them, or they'll actually find a route through this sort of trade relationship and a bit more normalcy with return. But yeah, this is a unique time. I Think the second Trump presidency in terms of the security demands that he's making on the neighbors, over at least, you know, on paper, and using trade as a way to sort of wield the axe on that. So saying unless you do more on fentanyl, then we're going to impose 25% tariffs on autoparts. You know, the relationship hasn't worked that way in the past, so it's disruptive at the very least, whether or not it ends up being effective. I was reading this morning that the amount of seizures of fentanyl have significantly increased under Claudia Schoenbaum's first three, four months in government, specifically, I imagine, because that is where the new narrative is at. And Donald Trump is pushing that hard. And in order for these tariffs to be avoided, I think she wants to be able to hold up numbers that say, look, we are making a difference. You know, this is how much we have increased, you know, the seizures of fentanyl. These are the numbers of drones that would take fentanyl north of the border undetected that have been seized. You know, this is the number of tunnels, tunnels that we've closed between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso and other border cities. All of these things work well. Whether or not the fentanyl is actually the driving force of why Donald Trump is trying to act quite hard towards his neighbor to the south and his neighbour to the north, or it's a pretext, is always up for debate.
- [43:19]
Sleepy Podcast Host
Hey, do you have trouble sleeping? Then maybe you should check out the Sleepy Podcast. It's a show where I read old books in the public domain to help you get to sleep. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of classic stories like A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, Winnie the Pooh. Stories that are great for adults and kids alike. For years now, Sleepy has helped millions of people catch some much needed Z's, start their next day off fresh and discover old books that they didn't know they loved. So whether you have a tough time snoozing or you just like a good bedtime story, fluff up the cool side of your pillow and tune into Sleepy. Unless you're driving, then please don't listen to Sleepy. Find Sleepy on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes each week. Sweet dreams.
- [44:19]
Andrew Fitzgerald
Every town has a dark side. This is Andrew Fitzgerald from the Everytown podcast, where every single week we dive into insane and mysterious true crime stories, most of which you've never heard of. Stories like the bizarre disappearance of Tyler Davis In Columbus, Ohio, a 29 year old father trying to find his way back to his hotel when he disappeared and was never heard from again. And Elizabeth Shoaff from Lugoff, South Carolina, who was abducted from her driveway by a madman and taken to his underground bunker in the woods. We give you all the details you're interested in hearing about without any fluff or fillers because ain't nobody got time for that. We cover everything from psychopaths to poltergeists. So go check. Check out the Everytown podcast because every town, no matter how nice it may seem, has a dark side.
- [45:12]
Sean Williams
When you listen to Nobody listens to Paula Poundstone, the comedy podcast, you learn stuff.
- [45:17]
Will Grant
I've been learning to throw a boomerang because this is the kind of thing.
- [45:20]
Advertisement Voice
That really gets the listeners engaged.
- [45:22]
Will Grant
You know, interviews with people who will make you smarter. Does the amount that you learn protect you from collecting cognitive decline? Can't people just listen to the show? Can't they just enjoy a delightful treehouse full of information? And I think I'm bleeding. Join us and be a nobody. From his rhetoric, it is fentanyl and undocumented immigration. But of course it plays very well to his base to be tough with your neighbors anyway, you know, because as it were, you can. He's playing it that they have been taking advantage of the United States and now under his watch, they won't be. So you're in that context, as you say, a FIFA World Cup. They have to. This is the most important trade relationship, trading relationship for the United States. Mexico is its biggest trading partner. They have to find some kind of modus operandi. And then, and then you throw into that the stuff like the Rancho and all of the lurid and frightening headlines that come with that and it's only grist for the mill. He's of course re designated six Mexican cartels, including the cjng as, as a, as foreign terrorist organizations. So therefore, will that give the US Military carte blanche to get involved and how much will they be able to do that? Will it mean therefore joint operations with the Mexican military against certain targets? You know, what are we going to see? I mean, we're only two months into the second Trump presidency, believe it or not, with everything that's happened in two years time in, halfway through his time, his time in office, will there have actually made huge inroads into this stuff or will it all be smoke and mirrors? I mean, we'll have to see, but certainly I don't think this idea of kind of keeping it Keeping fentanyl, keeping security, keeping undocumented immigration at the sort of forefront of the conversation so that all debates have to sort of pass through that narrative first will change because it plays very well for him too, to be doing that, you know, saying, look, there's terrible things going down south of the border. And up until now, Claudia Schoenbaum has rightly been applauded for how she's been managing it because she's managed it quite deftly. But again, I keep saying when, when this comes up that we are very, very early in their bilateral relationship and there is a lot more, you know, water to pass under the bridge in terms of, you know, stumbling blocks to come, fallings out agreements and so on and so forth. But she has gotten off to a good start, I would say.
- [48:07]
Sean Williams
And so, yeah, to go back to El Salvador and another populist, obviously, how you were there for what, five, five days, something like this?
- [48:16]
Will Grant
Yeah, it was, it was short and sweet. I go reasonably often. Christine Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary, was visiting the sickot and I didn't actually get into the sickot because it was just the bubble of people who were with her, who were Fox News and so on. But the BBC has been in, they have currently frozen all entrance to the facility, presumably because everybody is keen to see what's going on with the Venezuelans and they want to control the narrative of that. If you see that every time there's this video out of the secot, particularly related to the Venezuelan prisoners who've been sent there from the United states under an 18th century law, all of the video material comes from the government of El Salvador itself. These drone shots, these kind of, you know, night, nighttime shots, everybody being hair heads being shaved of the, of the prisoners. So Nate Bukele is a master of, of pr, if nothing else. So that he was a PR man before he, he got into politics. And it really shows, you know, that he has managed his media relationships very, very well. Well, he doesn't sit down with the likes of the BBC or CNN or Al Jazeera or at least he hasn't so far. He did more so as mayor of San Salvador, but not as president. And then he's much more likely to rock up on a kind of YouTuber channel or talking to Tucker Carlson or something. So he's managing the relationships with the media that he wants that way. He's doing things through the use of X or Twitter and through his own kind of media outlet, as it were, or, you know, the government's managing of These drone pictures and these incredible shots they themselves produce and then distribute. So that's interesting. I have spoken to him and I put it to him on the day that he was re elected that okay, nobody could deny that you've changed the sort of social fabric of El Salvador with your state of emergency, but there are so many cases of people who are wrongly behind bars as a result of this. And I gave him the example of the young man I've been following called Jose du Valmata, who was seeming completely arbitrarily picked up and has ended up in the secot. And I said we have all the paperwork about him, about how he had a bank loan and a job and he has a good character. Testament testimony from his employer, from hundreds of people in the community saying that he was not a gang member. Are you now going to be looking to try and get that young man out and others like him? And he launched into an 11 minute diatribe which he later put out on Twitter against me and the BBC and the British monarchy and anything and everything under the sun about how I simply wouldn't understand what it's like to be from a country or a city which has the highest murder rate in the world. And sort of threw it back on me rather than answering the question. Subsequently, his team asked me for all the information about this, this particular prisoner. I gave it to them in the hard copies that I had on me. He then tweeted it out five or six days later and that reminded him that he said he'd follow up on it. And they asked me for digital copies of everything about this lad. I sent that to them. But he remains in prison and his mother hasn't seen or heard from him for three years. Now that that's the Salvadorans being arrested under the state of emergency, this state of exception, the crackdown and put into the secot and other prisons. What's so shocking in a sense about this Trump killing accord is that first it seems like it's just a verbal agreement, there's no paperwork to back it up, that these people have been deported under a very little used 18th century law of the 1798 Alien Enemies act, that those flight, at least one of those flights continued despite the specific order for it to turn round from Federal Judge, just 17 more people associated supposedly with Trenda, Aragua and Ms. 13 have been deported now, even though an appeals court has upheld a temporary injunction on any more deportation. And I spoke to the lawyer for, for some of the, some of the Venezuelans and he said that they don't have criminal records in the US they don't have them in Venezuela, and they certainly don't have them in El Salvador. And that really struck home because not only have you not committed a crime beyond illegally crossing the border, but you know, the family members saying they're not members of Trenda Aragua. And I spoke to one mother at length and are still speaking to her a lot. She's saying he simply was not a member of the Trend Aragua. He was a carpet fitter for apartments in Texas. And so his only crime, as it were, were to cross legally into the US So if he was going to be deported, he should be deported back to Venezuela. And yet now he's been sent to the harshest prison in the Americas, arguably one of the, or probably the harshest prison in the world, where his head has been shaved, where he's been thrust into a prison uniform and then thrown into this cell. And beyond that, we simply don't know. Are they actually getting better treatment than the Ms. 13 and 18th street gang members in there? Their lawyer hasn't been able to see them as far as he's told me. He said he hasn't had any access to them, they haven't had any phone calls. And of course they're not actually facing any formal charge in El Salvador. So under what law, either national or international, are they there? Beyond an agreement made verbally by Nayib Bukele to Marco Rubio as an envoy of Donald Trump? So it is extremely questionable legal grounds that it's all happening on. And I found it noticeable that even people who support the state of exception in El Salvador did find the idea that El Salvador was going to be somehow the jailer of the world, you know, of the Americas. They found that a bridge too far, if you like.
- [54:32]
Sean Williams
Yeah. I was going to ask you, when you were speaking to people on the ground, what kind of opinions were you facing from people towards this mass incarceration? Because presumably there are so many people swept up in these dragnets that everybody knows somebody who is in there, whether they are gang members or otherwise.
- [54:53]
Will Grant
I think in certain communities everybody knows someone. There's very little sympathy, of course, to those who have been lifted up and were picked up and were part of, you know, gang life. That's that simple. I mean, people back this measure. One thing Nayib Bukele is fundamentally telling the truth on is the support that there is among the Salvadoran public for the measure is very, very high. And that that can't really be questioned. I went to the Protest on the third anniversary of the state of exception. And it was just a handful of 100 people. You know, we're talking four or five hundred people for a measure that was meant to be a month long and has been extended 35 times and it's now three years long, you know, which. Which suspends certain constitutional rights and so on and so forth. You would think that sort of a decent sector of society would say, this is wrong and we shouldn't be doing it, you know, but of course, if your neighborhood was run by the gangs, if you had to pay extortion every time you took your taxi out, every time you opened your shop, you were super fearful every time you took your children up the hill to go to the primary school, and suddenly these guys are gone to jail for as long as it will last. There's no longer any of this graffiti, this menacing graffiti. They ran things called Casa Destroyer, which were much like extermination or recruitment site that we've been hearing about. It's their homes inside the communities where they would carry out torture, rape, murder and so on. You're just really unthinkable things going on in ordinary, otherwise ordinary communities in San Salvador. So look, he is right. It does have that support. I think ordinary people, though, do feel that there's a limit now to how long it can just be, you know, allowed to carry on. And for those who have been caught up in the dragnet of arrests with no discernible links to gang crime at all, who are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, or who got reported on by a neighborhood and now are trying to disprove that they had any illicit association with the gang members, or even when you have gangs who are so much part of the social fabric of a place, they might knock on your door and say, hold this money until I tell you otherwise. You're going to say, no, hold these guns until I come up and pick them up. You just have to do it. But then you are being reported on as being part of illicit association or your name has been thrown out and you found you've been part of this thing, and three years later you're still behind bars. All of these are genuine stories that have happened to people and the vilification of anybody who speaks out against it is a thing because, you know, it has this popular backing. So I think people are sympathetic for the. To those who have been caught up in it unjustly, but there is this background feeling that they are just simply not expendable, but kind of cannon Fodder for a bigger war, if you know what I mean. Yeah. I think there's those who just feel like, you know, while it's terrible, it's happened to that number of thousands, and they probably don't think it's as many as it is. Certain human rights NGOs think it could be as many as 20% or more of those who were picked up. Like equating to thousands and thousands of people that, yeah, that was just a sort of necessary evil, a necessary cost to bringing peace to cities like San Salvador and to communities that were gang controlled.
- [58:35]
Sean Williams
Now, moving on to your book, Populista kind of, you know, tries to answer a question of how we got to this point.
- [58:43]
Will Grant
Here we go.
- [58:44]
Sean Williams
Nice. It's a really beautiful cover as well.
- [58:47]
Will Grant
It is very nicely put together, I have to say. They did a lovely job. Yeah, there we are.
- [58:53]
Sean Williams
Yeah, nice. I guess you're kind of answering the question in the book of how have we got to this point where so many strongman leaders are now in seats of power across Latin America? And it's not just there, obviously. You know, I've been reporting in the Philippines the last few weeks, and Turkey is going through its own turmoil. Erdogan seems to be sort of, you know, clinging onto power with his. His fingernails at the moment, as he tends to do and tends to usually win. And one of the. The answers to that question is crime. And the nexus between organized crime and politics. You go through a series of. Of examples in the book. You've got Arnado Ochoa in. In Cuba and his execution for. For working with cartels to allow them to use Cuban waters, I think, to drop off drug shipments. You know, Hugo Chavez and his leaning on the Marandros in Venezuela, sort of. How many instances of this crossover did you find while reporting the book? And sort of how many of these leaders that we've sort of cemented in the history of Latin America are actually woven into the story of organized crime, too?
- [60:07]
Will Grant
So the book tries to look at the pink tide of starting with Hugo Chavez coming to power in 1999 and then ending in 2016 with Fidel Castro's death. And that, to me, sort of bookmarked this swing to the left in the Americas that now seems to be swinging back the other way quite hard and may well swing again. You know, that's politics. And I tried to look at populist kind of tropes and traits and of course, you know, found that really, in many ways there is old, as old as politics in Latin America itself. That there's nothing new necessarily about some of the language and some of the ways that the populists are setting themselves up as sort of pseudo messiahs, that only I can fix this, that I should change the Constitution for us to remain in power. Because if not, then everything that you've got, not as a result of me being here, will fall away. So, you know, we are the only people and anybody else who isn't, who doesn't want this revolution are not the people. You know, all of these sorts of trope, tropes I, you know, I found examples of dating back to, you know, the sort of 18th century and so on, 19th century. So it was fascinating. It was a sort of historical, you know, that's its intention is to be a sort of history book, really a first draft of it in Israel as well, while still being journalistic. But yeah, you're right. The nexus between organized crime and politics in the Americas is very closely linked. There are examples, like you say, the use of sort of virtually paramilitary groups by the Chavistas in Venezuela to enforce control in the neighborhoods, to run security around kind of rallies and events and things like that. And some very, very dangerous people who come down on motorbike gangs from the colectivos, as they were called, who come down from the shanty towns when called upon, as it were, seemingly led by Diostado Cabello or allegedly led by Diostado cause at various times has held various roles in the Venezuelan government, extremely powerful and influential. So of course you could take that and then move to the relationship on the right too between say Alvaro Uribe in Colombia and his alleged links between. And use of the paramilitaries, the AUC in Colombia and their drug trafficking links and, and you know, the Balsos positivos in terms of sort of faking finding. I believe it was like the death of the murder of kind of campesinos and then faking them to look like they were members of the FARC by putting Wellington boots on them and things like this, scandals, you know, to do with organized crime, money and power will go right the way through any history book of the Americas. My feeling is that these things aren't getting any better. The book isn't specifically, you know, about the relationship with organized crime, but as you say, it's a sort of recurring theme in amongst that. I mean, there are, there are other leaders I look at like Lula and Evo Morales, whose hands are far cleaner in terms of those things, who I wouldn't put in those sorts of camps at all. But the history of Brazil and the history of Bolivia, definitely we see, you know, there was, I looked at something called the cocaine coup In Bolivia in 1980, for example, staggering stuff that, you know, I'm a student of all this and I really didn't know anything about it at all. So it was, it was a journey of sort of discovery for me too. Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless.
- [64:07]
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Will Grant
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Will Grant
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- [64:50]
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- [65:19]
Will Grant
I think the danger of course is when we're talking about populist politics and individuals then it's far easier for them to have direct relationships. And I think the most contemporary one that we can think of is Juan Orlando Hernandez in Honduras who has been basically now is in prison in the us, has been extradited, faced criminal case in the United States, found guilty of cocaine trafficking. He was the president of the country. So you know the relationship when one man rules the roost, when one man or woman is the all encompassing power is for people around him or her, if not that person himself to be able to start moving into kind of very dangerous circles or very worrying circles because they have total enough to impunity at least for a time. So I think it's something that we have potential to see a lot more of if you know, not a lot less. I think populist politics is one of the dangers, is that organized crime can start filling in the role of the state or the state becomes part of, you know, of enforcer rather than public servant.
- [66:38]
Sean Williams
There's a kind of dichotomy going on in a lot of the countries of Latin America as well, right, where the leaders as part of their strongman image will be. I mean, Bukele is a perfect example of this where it's like using the mano dure in one, you know, on one hand and locking up thousands of people, but in, you know, shaded rooms, he's making deals with the leaders of MS.13 and the gangs to try and be like, hey guys, can you stamp it down to keep, you know, to keep everything under wraps while I'm, while I'm doing my thing. And that seems to be the case in Colombia as well and other nations, right?
- [67:13]
Will Grant
Certainly allegedly. I mean, obviously, you know, he denies that and certainly I think in Colombia too. But you know, the Colombian example, you know, there was the confession, you know, admission even by Pedro's son that, you know, that relationships were had. Nicolas Maduro's nephews, the adopted, adopted children essentially of his, of his wife, Celia Flores, the first, first combatant, the first lady essentially of Venezuela, were picked up making a drug deal with what they thought were Honduran drug cartel members in Haiti, but turned out to be DEA agents and were only released as part of a prisoner swap with Americans during the Biden administration, much to the annoyance of DEA agents who brought them down. So, you know, the perfect kind of narco relationship in politics is. Touches a bit on nepotism, a bit on dirty campaign money, you know, a bit on political violence, a bit on military power. You know, all of these things come together very well because it's again, that criminal thing of like, if I, if I've compromised you, then you're in this with me. And so both of us are going down. So I think there's, you know, we've seen the case in Mexico of, of Geno Garcia Luna. He was the anti drug czar of this nation and there he was, you know, apparently protecting one cartel over the other. So, you know, it is a long standing and dirty relationship in terms of absolute power or executive power or legislative power, you know, military power, and the cartels or organized crime in general. And I think it's given almost like an extra shot in the arm by populist politics because of the nature of the them and us, you know, so if you're in the. Then you're very much protected. You're very much immune from prosecution or investigation even.
- [69:27]
Sean Williams
Yeah. The rise of Latin America's 21st century strongman. That's your book. Populista is fantastic. I've had a read of it. Do you want to wave it in front of the camera One more? I will do one more wave of that sexy cover.
- [69:38]
Will Grant
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, they've gone for a bit of a provocative idea there of Bolsonaro on the one hand and Chavez on the other. And I think, you know, the suggestion that trying to sort of say that ideology was irrelevant, you know, and it's all about power. And I think on some level in populism that is ending up being true. You know, can one really say that Daniel Ortega any more in Nicaragua is a man of the left, of the traditional left, that he was, you know, as a Sandinista, or is him and his wife just interested in holding onto power for power's sake? You know, and the same as Nicolas Maduro. Is he genuinely a leftist anymore or is he just simply a despot? You know, and so these are themes that I'm fascinated in and I like to get into around the day job and through the day job job as well, as much as possible.
- [70:30]
Sean Williams
Well, thanks so much for joining us. Will, where are you off to next? Are you. Are you on any travels soon?
- [70:35]
Will Grant
I am. I think I'm going to go up to the border. I'll be back up in Tijuana again soon. I think this relationship on the border is going to be so interesting over the next few years. And I think my job and the job of the rest of the journalists in involved in kind of telling stories from. From Mexico is to try and differentiate between the sort of smoke and mirrors a little bit, because there's so much rhetoric, there's so much a sense of, you know, well, thousands. I'm going to chuck out, you know, the biggest mass deportation in American history is what Donald Trump has, as it were, promised his supporters. But as yet, we're not seeing that. And, you know, did he in fact, inherit quite a secure border? What does it mean to have 10,000 troops sent to the border by Mexico? Is it making any genuine difference? We've certainly seen the number of people being encountered, they call them encounters on the US Southern border drop to its lowest level essentially since they started taking monthly totals in the fiscal year 2000. So something is happening right on, on some level. But I think that job of sort of determining between the rhetoric and the reality, the smoke and mirrors. And the truth on the ground is one that we should all try and do as much as we can. And I think we all kind of relish at a moment like this because there's certainly a lot of noise around it all at the moment. And, and then it's quite interesting to actually go and say, fine, but this is what we saw. This is who we spoke to. This is their perspective, you know, and, and try and get that to a bigger audience as we can, whether it's the BBC World Service or Radio 4 or the website or TV or whatever it might be. You know, it's. It's kind of a privilege to be able to go and chat to some of those people and help tell those stories.
- [72:26]
Sean Williams
Yeah, absolutely. Well, good luck with that trip. Stay safe. And yeah, maybe we'll come back to you on the. On the back end of that one or maybe later as you continue reporting. Thanks, Will.
- [72:36]
Will Grant
For sure. Anytime you like. Sean. Real pleasure. It.
- [73:04]
Sean Williams
Sam.
- [73:29]
Will Grant
Sa.
- [73:59]
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