#7 Ed Calderon Drug Cartel / Narcos Expert

In this episode of The Shawn Ryan Show, former Navy SEAL/CIA Contractor Shawn Ryan sits down with Ed Calderon. For over a decade Ed Calderon worked in the fields of counter narcotics, organized crime investigation, in the northern-border region of Mexico. He is a considered to be one of the top experts in the operations and tactics of the Mexican Drug Cartels and Narcos. Shawn and Ed discuss everything from Ed's personal experiences fighting cartels face to face and the mental and physical scars it has left behind forever, to why China is involving themselves in cartel operations deep in Mexico to how the Cartels are effectively utilizing American street gangs to push more drugs into the United States. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website - https://www.shawnryanshow.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnryanshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawnryan762 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:38Shawn Ryan?

  All right, it's finally here. Ed Calderon is on the Sean Ryan Show. And yes, we've read all 2,282 emails requesting, "Why the hell has Ed's episode not been released yet?" But before I give it to you, just a quick word from our sponsors.

• 2:04Shawn Ryan?

  This episode is sponsored by Vigilance Elite. That's me. Head over to vigilanceelite.com, hit the Training tab. We have over 100 videos of tactical training and prepping shit, too. Where we teach everything from how to politely remove somebody out of your way. You might be creating some issues. Two, if you're just that guy or lady who's looking to get proficient with a firearm and just learn the basics to protect your family, we have that on there.

• 2:42Shawn Ryan?

  And while you're at vigilanceelite.com, head over to the store, buy yourself a bag of gummy bears and whatever else is in there.

• 2:55Shawn Ryan?

  Now enjoy the show.

• 2:58Speaker 05

  Think about this. The largest, fastest growing cartel in Mexico was the new generation cartel, grew exponentially in influence and power, not just in Mexico, but in the US during the COVID epidemic. One of their biggest moneymakers outside of drugs is trafficking, human trafficking of all kinds. We live in a country where people are talking about reparations for slavery when there's actual slavery still in this country. During training, they would get a dog that they would take care of for a few weeks. They would sleep with and feed and all this type of stuff, name it. And then they would have to kill it and eat it.

• 3:42Shawn Ryan?

  Why is China's interest in Mexico becoming so strong?

• 3:46Speaker 05

  It's your Achilles heel as a country. Seen a law cartel runs a lot of their distribution with some of the local black gangs in places like Chicago. So we use them by proxy. I was covered in blood, my clothing was covered in blood. And my sneakers, my socks, feeling my toes.

• 4:09Shawn Ryan?

  Welcome back to the Sean Ryan Show. This is episode 007. To kick things off, I want to say thank you to all the patrons out there. We have an overwhelming response on Patreon, which is supporting the show. And some news with that, we will be taking two volunteers from our Tier 3 group, and I'm going to put them through a mindset challenge. So if you're on Tier 3, maybe you'll get picked. Two volunteers, we're looking at hopefully mid-December.

• 4:47Shawn Ryan?

  Moving on from that, thank you to everyone who left us an iTunes review. If you can't support us on Patreon, please at least take one moment, go to iTunes, leave us a review. That really helps us with the show. With that being said, hit the Like button, leave a comment, and it's time to introduce our next guest, 007.

• 5:17Shawn Ryan?

  007 is a Mexican-American immigrant who did it the right way. He immigrated to the United States to evade the Mexican drug cartel. He is considered an expert in the space of narco trafficking and Mexican drug cartels. He's a real-world MacGyver. He is TSA's worst fucking nightmare. He's seen it all and been face-to-face with the cartels in the most real, vivid, dangerous ways possible. Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to present Senor Ed Calderon.

• 6:08Shawn Ryan?

  Well Ed, I am fucking super excited that you're here, man. We've been trying to get this going for several months now and finally, finally hit a date that works for both of us. But you are like the current narco expert and, uh, and Americans, I think everybody, but Americans are completely infatuated and interested in, in that subject matter. Um, there's so many shows out and documentaries and it's been like that for a long time and to include myself.

• 6:50Shawn Ryan?

  So I can't wait to, you know, dive into some of that stuff and, um, me personally, a lot of people don't know this, but I lived in Colombia for almost, almost five years and, uh, and, uh, was addicted to cocaine down there and, and, uh, kind of immersed myself in that narco culture because I was so, I got more addicted to the rush of being around it than I was the actual drug and, um, and, uh, I'd kind of like to, you know, compare notes to some of the stuff that you've seen and some of the stuff that I've experienced,

• 7:33Shawn Ryan?

  uh, and, uh, on a low level and, um, being around that kind of shit and, uh, so anyways, I'm super fucking pumped you're here, man.

• 7:43Speaker 05

  I'm excited to be here, man.

• 7:44Shawn Ryan?

  So, yeah, but, uh, I always start everything out with a gift.

• 7:49Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 7:50Shawn Ryan?

  So.

• 7:53Speaker 05

  First off, always hear if it's ticking. Always drop the cellphone far away from it, right?

• 7:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 8:01Speaker 05

  That's what they do, right? That's how you know if somebody is, oh, thank you. It's like a, yeah, that's, that's cool. Thank you for that.

• 8:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you're welcome.

• 8:12Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:13Shawn Ryan?

  Some gummy bears?

• 8:14Speaker 05

  All of it, all about that right there. Thank you for that, man.

• 8:18Shawn Ryan?

  Feel free to dig in.

• 8:22Speaker 05

  That's pretty heavy. I wonder what that may be.

• 8:30Speaker 05

  Oh, look at that.

• 8:34Speaker 05

  Look at that thing right there. Hmm. I wonder what this fits.

• 8:38Shawn Ryan?

  It might happen to fit that right there. But, uh, I listen, I did a ton of research on you and, uh, you have this thing for golden guns.

• 8:50Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, it's, I think it's a Mexican to me, some, some, for some reason, I think it's the Aztec and a little bit of the Spaniard mixed into there. The first enhanced interrogation in, in the, in the American continent was done by the Spaniards, burning the feet of Moctezuma so he could, so they could, you know, Moctezuma could admit where the gold was hidden.

• 9:10Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 9:11Speaker 05

  So I think, uh, I think it's probably, it stems back to that, uh, gold lust, you know? That's beautiful. Thank you for that. That is, it's an amazing piece right there.

• 9:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, uh, so yeah, that goes to a 50 cal Desert Eagle, gold plated. And, uh, so I figured, you know, the first break we take, I haven't broken that thing in yet, so, uh, we'll jut out back and,

• 9:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:36Shawn Ryan?

  blow some shit up and, uh, you know, see what she's made of. But, uh, have you shot one of those?

• 9:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, I have. Uh, I actually, uh, I found two of those guns in a water barrel, somewhere in Baja, that were traced back to the Fast and the Furious, uh, debacle way back when.

• 9:59Speaker 05

  They're, they're very sought after by some of the higher ups, uh, on both sides of it. Uh, there was a, uh, uh, army general that used to be part of the presidential protection detail that would carry around one of those things.

• 10:14Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 10:15Speaker 05

  You know, they, usually the officers in the army in Mexico don't get height requirements, so the guy was pretty short, you know? So he carried one of those in a leather holster under his jacket, you know? Why? I don't know. He's trying to make up for something probably.

• 10:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Why not?

• 10:31Speaker 05

  But it's a, it's a, it's a pretty interesting gun. Gold guns have a long history down there. Um, from Chalino Sanchez and his 38, uh, commander, uh, come, commando gun to Ochapo's, uh, famous, uh, pistol. That had his, uh, Ford's 100, uh, uh, top, uh, 1,000 number on there. Um, yeah.

• 10:53Shawn Ryan?

  Is it like a status symbol?

• 10:56Speaker 05

  It is. That's how you know who's in charge or who's, who are the higher ups in some of the cartel parties. See those gold guns floating around. It's kind of more of a Sinaloa thing. Each of the regions in Mexico have their own thing. I don't know exactly where that comes from, but there's a cult to a forbidden saint in Sinaloa. Malverde, Jesús Malverde. It's a guy with a mustache, basically Mexican Robin Hood is the clearest way to kind of describe him. Back in the third of the century, he was a famous bandit that would rob the rich people coming in through the town. And the loot that he would get from them would be handed out to the townspeople.

• 11:42Speaker 05

  Eventually, he pushed his luck too much and he got shot in the leg. He knew he was, he was almost going to be caught. The government put on a 10 gold coin reward for his capture.

• 11:56Speaker 05

  And he told one of his best friends, according to the legend, he told one of his best friends to turn him in and get the money and disperse it to the townspeople. So he was hung from a tree and the order was not to bury him, to leave him there to rot.

• 12:09Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 12:11Speaker 05

  Eventually, somebody in the town prayed to him because when he was alive, he would help out the townspeople with money and whatever. One of the townspeople prayed to him, said, "You helped me in life, now help me in death and I'll, and I'll make sure to bury you." And that was his first miracle. He fell down from the tree and each of the townspeople, instead of burying him, they just put a rock over his body. Eventually, it's a pile of rocks there, which later on turned into his grave and later on turned into a shrine. So the whole gold thing is kind of related. I

• 12:49Speaker 05

  think it's probably related to that 10 piece of gold reward that was set up for him. So it's an interesting kind of a probable link to the whole gold fascination, how some of these things are used as status symbols.

• 13:05Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. That's interesting.

• 13:08Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Ed, your number 007. So, yeah, it's a pretty big episode.

• 13:15Speaker 05

  Nobody read too much into that, though.

• 13:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, right. But, uh, so you consider yourself a non-permissive environment specialist?

• 13:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:24Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, you run an Instagram page, Ed's Manifesto, and, uh, you teach courses on, you know, how to blend in, how to survive, um, how to escape and evade. And, uh, it's, it, uh, after talking with you a little bit, it seems kinda like, uh, a hodgepodge class full of, of, of, of skills that are, um, seem to be very resourceful. And, uh, and, uh, I think that is fascinating. I actually wanted to go to your course in Cincinnati.

• 14:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:04Shawn Ryan?

  That was when we were gonna try to do this first, and I didn't do it because I needed to prepare for this. But I do wanna go to one of your courses and get that experience.

• 14:14Speaker 05

  I mean, it's, it's hood rat shit.

• 14:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Speaker 05

  I mean, I wish I could call it something cool, like field craft or, or tradecraft or something like that. But it's realistically, it's me going and doing a class and recounting the experiences and the conversations of all the people that I've kind of had to meet, talk to, converse with and learn from during my whole experience, uh, in Mexico, working for the government. Uh, interesting thing, actually, the, the Ed's Manifesto tagline came from an NSW guy that I trained with.

• 14:45Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 14:46Speaker 05

  So I would always have a Moleskine notebook that I would write down things in, as far as like class notes.

• 14:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 14:53Speaker 05

  Not a very common thing for Mexicans to do that. So I was, uh, I was in Coronado, uh, training with, uh, NCIS guys. Some of them were former team guys. Uh, they were doing a combat medical, uh, class for us. So like the first time I, I saw a tourniquet or the first time I ever trained how to pack a wound was there with some of those guys. Um, and, uh, there's a, "What are you writing in your little manifesto?" was the thing that he kept asking. "No, I'm just writing some notes, right?" I'm just kidding, I'm just fucking with you. So that's where the tagline as manifesto actually came from. That's cool. Um, I've, I've always made it a point to collect and take down notes and record.

• 15:35Speaker 05

  And anything I see of interest, I would always kind of, uh, collect, um, from conversations with people that we would detain.

• 15:44Speaker 05

  I never made the mistake of dehumanizing my enemy. I think that's a, that's a common mistake that I see a lot of people do. Uh, what I mean by dehumanizing the enemy, it's not about, uh, celebrating him. It's not about emulating him. It's about learning from him. So example, fifteen year old, um, Fernando. Fifteen year old Fernando is the guy that just kid distributes cocaine to, uh, cocaine and heroin to a lot of the people that, uh, travel into one of the, uh, the, the zona rosas or the, the tolerant zones in Tijuana. That's where all the, um, prostitution takes place, uh, legal prostitution, allowed prostitution. Uh, we're on him for a while.

• 16:29Speaker 05

  We finally caught him, you know, caught him slipping. He was buying a cell phone for his girlfriend. And that's where we got him. Handcuffed him, put him in the car. He got free of the handcuffs, ran. A few of our guys caught him and a few of them wanted to beat him up. I said, calm down, grabbed them, took him back to the car, zip tied him and handcuffed him this time. And asked him, how did you get out of those? And he proceeded to show me, right? Yeah. Um, he used a, a small piece of metal from a, from a, um, street sweeper, a, a, a street sweeper bristle.

• 17:11Speaker 05

  And he would always carry a ma- like a rare magnet or a magnet to pick some of those up. And he would always hide them on his person. And then he would grab the handcuff itself and flip it to the side. So it looks like it's closed, but it's actually open.

• 17:24Speaker 05

  Those two tricks I learned from him, I've been showing across the country to some high level people and some low level people and they always get amazed by it.

• 17:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 17:31Speaker 05

  And I always say I learned this from a 15 year old kid.

• 17:34Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, you call it hood rat shit, but all it is is fucking real shit that actually works that people have come up with and, and you've documented it all and put it into, you know, your manifesto. How many different, like roughly in an estimation, or maybe if you do have an exact number, but how many different types of these skills do you have documented?

• 17:59Speaker 05

  I mean, I have, I have a lot of VHS tapes of some conversations I had with some of these people.

• 18:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 18:06Speaker 05

  I have a lot of digital recordings of some of the conversations I have with some of these people. I have pictures and, and the Moleskines related to hood rat fortifications on some safe houses to, you know, steal water and steal doors meant to negate the use of an angle grinder or, or of a battering ram. Basically the water reverberates the, the pressure on the steel. And I have all those notes and pictures and stuff like that. That's I gather. I have no idea how much I have, but I, I, I, I don't, I don't hoard it. A lot of people hoard that stuff. I, I've shared some of that stuff pretty openly on my social media.

• 18:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Speaker 05

  And every time I get a chance to train with or go and advise in some, in some capacity, some unit, some group, some group of people, like I got a, I got the opportunity to show some of the stuff that I know to some of this, at the Secret Service Academy, to some of those guys. Specifically how to hide things that are non-ferris and non-magnetic and how to smuggle things through points of security. And it was surprising how some of those simpler things surprised them, how some of those were unknown.

• 19:20Speaker 05

  But that's kind of the point behind most of the stuff that I do. I want to put this into the hands of people, even the public, the general public itself. People sometimes get afraid when I share something that, to them, was secret.

• 19:35Speaker 05

  An example of this is the, I shared a picture of zip tie restraint, homemade zip tie restraint, with an angle cut in the inside of them. So when they would put them on, the angle cut in the zip tie would stab into your wrists. Now, that was pretty unknown to the general public, but it was widely used in Mexico by some Russian groups. The reason they made that that way is that a lot of these guys, I actually got to see an open laptop and doing some site exploitation stuff down in Mexico. And I got to see their browsing history, which was fascinating to me, you know? What are these guys looking at? And YouTube, escaping of Asian videos.

• 20:19Speaker 05

  People escaping from zip ties, doing the classic bursting method to escape from them. So they decided to put angles in them, so that when you tried to do that, you would hurt yourself and/or basically commit suicide. Now, that is a product of evolution. They are evolving, they're changing the way they're doing things. And you, and we as people that share some of that stuff are better served educating the public about some of these things. So they can see how deep the hole goes, and they can counter that preparation that the bad guys have, or the counter guys have, to what we are going to plan to do to counteract that, if we find ourselves in a situation like that.

• 21:00Speaker 05

  That's a small example of it, but things are evolving out there. People are, people that have a lot of training in Mexico, like some of the people that I used to work with, are now working for the cartel.

• 21:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 21:17Speaker 05

  Things are shared online and immediately get distributed to every single terrorist network out there in the world, and also most intelligence services as well. So that stuff gets propagated and shared, and it's a free-for-all when it comes to information.

• 21:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, and then new tactics evolve, you know, because of that, but...

• 21:37Speaker 05

  An example of Hong Kong protesters using lasers.

• 21:41Speaker 05

  All it took was their action. Now they change the way people do things.

• 21:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 21:46Speaker 05

  So, you know, some of those lasers you can source on in places like Alibaba, you know, and you can modify them easily by some of the stuff you see on YouTube. So that's a quantum leap over how they weaponize basically focused light.

• 21:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 21:59Speaker 05

  It's fascinating to see that, how an idea spreads like a virus in a way. The same thing with all the criminal methodology that I'm gonna share and expose.

• 22:12Speaker 05

  They see something that is, they get horrified and surprised by it. "Oh Ed, why are you showing the criminals this?" No, they already know it. I'm showing the people that live safely in the confines of whatever community they are a part of that have never been exposed to this. I'm sharing this to them so they can see how deep the well is. Right? So they can keep their kids close, so they can put a sign on the well that the well is deep.

• 22:37Speaker 05

  There's, I get a lot of, a lot of the negativity I get is usually based on the whole, "You shouldn't share this openly."

• 22:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 05

  There are things that I don't share openly. And usually things that I've seen that are kind of reserved or kind of really, I haven't seen that much out there. But once I do, I try and share some of those things so people can see what they are.

• 22:59Shawn Ryan?

  So you grew up in Tijuana, Mexico, and you started your law enforcement career in 2004?

• 23:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:08Shawn Ryan?

  And doing my research, it sounded like you were, actually you were in med school. You wanted to be a doctor.

• 23:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:15Shawn Ryan?

  And, and it sounded like your law enforcement career was kind of something that you were doing just to get you by while you were in med school. And then you go on to say that it took a very different turn and...

• 23:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, so... Nine eleven, where were you when, what, what, what did you do after nine eleven?

• 23:39Shawn Ryan?

  I was in the military.

• 23:41Speaker 05

  Awesome.

• 23:43Speaker 05

  That was completely like beyond the scope of my, I didn't want to do anything weapons related. I didn't want to serve. I didn't want to do anything like that. Nine eleven happened and it turned the economy into, it turned, I put the economy in the toilet along the border region, specifically in Tijuana, which lives off the border, right? Border times went longer because of all the new security precautions and the border was actually closed for the first time in like in recent history was during nine eleven. That affected my family's business and my own ability to kind of maintain myself.

• 24:22Speaker 05

  And I couldn't afford to stay in medical school. So I had to look for options, right? Saw an ad in the newspaper that they wanted young unmarried, no kids, bilingual young men for government work.

• 24:42Speaker 05

  I thought it was going to be community policing or some sort of information analysis type thing. And all of a sudden I was going through paramilitary training and getting my hair shaved off by a bunch of Mexican Gafi guys. And I didn't know what it was in for.

• 24:59Speaker 05

  There was this open door when we go in there, the academy that I went to was a regional academy. It was basically a refurbished prison. So they made this prison in, in, in this, in this

• 25:12Speaker 05

  hillside. And they discovered after they made it that there's a lot of fog there. So it didn't, it wasn't an optimal place to put a prison.

• 25:21Speaker 05

  But a police academy, you know, they can, they can get away with that. So it was not good enough to be a prison, but they turned it into a police academy, which is fascinating.

• 25:31Speaker 05

  We were treated, they told us at the start, there was this Colonel there. He said, "We have two things for you, pan y verga," which is bread and dick. And guess what, bread ran out two days ago, so all you're getting is dick, right? They had this open door policy there, you can just walk out if you wanted to, you wanted to quit. And they treated us like human refuse for about two months, two, three months. Basically, while we were going through that FBI background checks were being done, polygraph exams, background, financial checks, they were looking into our families. And a lot of people would get pulled out during the whole process.

• 26:13Shawn Ryan?

  So, just backtrack it real quick, so were you, you were already being fed into, like, almost an elite unit of the, of the police force, right from day one?

• 26:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, they were, they were training us up to do something, and I didn't know exactly what that was, but I was getting an idea because of the, you know, type of people that were training us. But I thought it was gonna be an analysis job, listening to phone calls, maybe translating stuff that I would hear somewhere in office somewhere, and all of a sudden I was getting handed a, handed a ballistic vest, a Glock, and a, and a G3 rifle. Just told, you know, go, they would give us a badge, and then they would tell us, "Just don't put it on, this'll get you killed after you see this badge." So, yeah, it was, it was pretty badly organized. The training was very low quality.

• 27:10Speaker 05

  I remember getting trained how to shoot Beretta 92FS pistol, a 99mm Beretta 92FS pistol. And I shot 20 rounds out of it while going through training, basic training there.

• 27:23Shawn Ryan?

  Shit.

• 27:24Speaker 05

  And when I got out, I got a Glock inside of a case. And I've never seen a Glock before, like, looking at this thing, like, where's the safety? Like, where's the, you know, I was like, trying to figure this out. It was that that type of retard retarded low level training in and you know the the you make fun of the guys that get the AK forty seven shot around him to get him acquainted to combat.

• 27:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 27:48Speaker 05

  I was one of the guys on the ground getting shot with that AK forty seven around to get him acquainted to all it gave me was bad hearing.

• 27:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 05

  Uh, that's a good way to make death and dumb people. Um, but that was that was what we had. That's what that's that's that's what they had to give us, right?

• 28:05Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 28:08Speaker 05

  That that lasted about a little bit over six months and then it was off to the races. And stepping into uh, of of the beginnings of what turned into the drug war, like the major part of the drug war.

• 28:24Shawn Ryan?

  How bad was uh, how bad was the how how bad were the cartels at that time?

• 28:30Speaker 05

  They were pretty bad, but it was it was it was the beginning of the modern fractioning, which turned into like the the worst parts of the drug war. Um, this was right before Felipe Calderon, uh, the the the conservative to the right president basically declared open warfare on the cartels. This was the president before him was in power. He was starting to push for some of these policies. Uh, and all of a sudden we had two thousand and six rolled around and kicked off. It was like there was bad stuff and violence happening. Uh, but he basically militarized and put all every basically gave a white uh, uh, a white card to governors across the country

• 29:15Speaker 05

  to do whatever they had to do to go after the cartels.

• 29:19Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 29:21Speaker 05

  So that's when things really got interesting. Um, there was a lot of fractioning going on with high level cartel guys being grabbed and the one cartel turning into two uh, legions just being tested around the country and and uh, kind of the violence uh, being orchestrated by cartel on cartel and also government on government. So you would run into a town where the state police was on the payroll of one cartel. The local municipal police was on the payroll of the other cartel. And the local military barracks were on the payroll of another cartel. So it was, you trust no one, like the smoking man and the X man and the X Y, as he used to say.

• 30:06Speaker 05

  That's what, that's part of the first lessons that I got was, trust no one.

• 30:10Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, when, uh, when Calderon took over in, in two thousand and six, uh, from the research I did, uh, it sounded like that was like a fucking switch got flipped.

• 30:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:23Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, I read that they estimate over two hundred and fifty thousand, uh,

• 30:31Shawn Ryan?

  people have been murdered.

• 30:32Speaker 05

  Those are, those are official numbers, so it's probably more. Also, they don't count the people that went missing.

• 30:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 30:40Speaker 05

  Uh, body disposal turned into an industrial effort in places like, uh, uh, Tijuana, where the famous stewmaker, uh, was, uh, was active. Uh, so what happened is that Felipe Calderon basically federalized the efforts against, uh, drugs and he put the military into the fight. And he also took, uh, certain elements of the police forces and embedded them with the military, which was some of the stuff that I did, uh, because we had arresting powers and they didn't. And also we knew our way around some of the places where they were operating.

• 31:18Speaker 05

  So one of the, one of the places where I worked was in Baja. And, um, I got to see the stewmaker and actually, I actually got to meet him and talk to him. The stewmaker, uh, was in, it was employed by the scene, by an elements of the Sinaloa cartel. He used to actually work for the Tijuana, the Ariano Felix cartel. Uh, but he, there was a split that happened and he went over to the Sinaloa side. He said that he was trained how to get rid of bodies by Israeli specialists that the cartel has brought in to train them. Right? Um, and that was like suspect when I heard it. It sounds like something that's kind of made up. Uh, but then I saw some elements of actual experience and craft in what he was doing.

• 32:05Speaker 05

  So he basically made caustic soda to get rid of the bodies with a lot of stuff you can buy on, you can buy at any hardware store. Didn't, didn't, didn't get a lot of attention because he was, he would always dress like an albany, like a worker, like a construction worker.

• 32:21Speaker 05

  He would, you know, make his caustic mixture, put a body in there without any clothing on. He would cut grid patterns on some of the tattoos and the face to get rid of that first. And he would dump that into a sand grater and get some of the solid pieces and put in the next batch. That's a sign of craft. Somebody, somebody showed him that. So, you know, makes me wonder.

• 32:48Speaker 05

  The amount, the amount of people that he got rid of as far as the bodies go is unknown. You know, there's different estimates out there. I don't know, like, nobody knows, but a whole generation of young people disappear in that, in that city.

• 33:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. What, what, what are some of the estimations?

• 33:07Speaker 05

  Five thousand.

• 33:08Shawn Ryan?

  Five thousand fucking people?

• 33:10Speaker 05

  That's one of the numbers that I heard.

• 33:12Shawn Ryan?

  One guy got rid of five thousand bodies.

• 33:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, he never murdered anybody, though. He said they would just get, you would just get bodies brought in. In a scene out of, out of Auschwitz, where he was found, there was a room full of shoes and clothing. That was creepy as hell to see. All those shoes and clothing belonged to somebody. And they just made these bodies appear. One time I was, uh, working with one of the older guys. So there's a generation of guys that were on when, when I went in, that didn't go through some of the security protocols that I went through. So some of them were more on the shady side than others. There is no such thing as not being, that being a cop in Mexico and not being shady somehow.

• 33:59Speaker 05

  Even I was kind of shady, maybe, I don't know. But one of the older guys, um, I was, uh, we saw, there was this pedestrian bridge and they had three bodies hanging from it, right? And I stood there and like, that's horrible. That's a horrible, cruel thing to do. And the older guy said, "The body's a gift." Should be thankful for it. I didn't really, I didn't kind of get what he meant. So what do you mean, man? That's horrible. No, I mean, at least the family's gonna get a body to bury and cry over. Body's a gift.

• 34:34Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 34:35Speaker 05

  That's that in a place where that hanging a body from a bridge is a sign of kindness.

• 34:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 34:45Speaker 05

  Well, that's a, that's a different kind of hell.

• 34:47Shawn Ryan?

  That, uh, that, that can put some shit into perspective.

• 34:52Shawn Ryan?

  Fuck, man. How long, uh, how long after your, how long into your career, do your law enforcement career in Tijuana, did, did it take for it to become real? Where, where you're like, this isn't a fucking game?

• 35:08Speaker 05

  As soon as I got out, probably the second day on the job. Uh, we, we were, uh, we were kind of spread out, uh, uh, in this, uh, in, in, in Baja State. And, uh, I got to see immediately the, the, the, uh, no fucks given by the cartels. So I remember me and probably eight other guys moving through downtown Tijuana in, uh, full kit, uh, driving around in some armored vehicles. And, um, getting the order to stop from the lead car that was in front of us.

• 35:49Speaker 05

  And we put, and we parked aside and everybody ran out of the cars and adopted defensive positions.

• 35:57Speaker 05

  And, uh, convoy probably, I'd say probably somewhere 15 vehicles just passed right next to us. All of them, uh, a few of them armored, uh, all of them with AK-47s. Some of them had federal police uniforms, some of them have army uniforms. Uh, we didn't know who they were. We're getting calls from the, uh, from the 911 service they have down there from the municipal police that, that, that they were caught, they were municipal cops, but they clearly weren't municipal cops. So we just got in a, you know, Mexican standoff with them. Didn't, nobody shot around, but they just passed by us. We called for, for support, uh, from the local police and, and nobody showed up.

• 36:38Shawn Ryan?

  How many of you guys were there?

• 36:40Speaker 05

  Probably nine.

• 36:41Shawn Ryan?

  Nine?

• 36:42Speaker 05

  Nine guys.

• 36:42Shawn Ryan?

  What's that, two cars?

• 36:44Speaker 05

  That's two cars, yeah.

• 36:45Shawn Ryan?

  And they had 15 fucking vehicles?

• 36:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we, that's when I realized that. There's no winning here, not like this.

• 36:53Shawn Ryan?

  Fuck, man.

• 36:54Speaker 05

  There's no winning, not like this, and uh.

• 36:59Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think there were no shots fired?

• 37:03Speaker 05

  They didn't feel threatened by us. They didn't have any fear. So they just passed by and they actually went to a local little restaurant there and adapted positions around it. Had dinner and then went back to their cars and left. No support came on our end, so it's one of those, that's when you realize how fucked you are. And how no support and how there's just no backing there. This was before the Felipe Calderon administration.

• 37:32Speaker 05

  Slowly but surely, things changed. We started getting more support, started getting more vehicles, more people coming in. Uh, we started working directly with the military and directly with some federal uh, operational uh, police forces.

• 37:48Speaker 05

  Eventually getting fear put into the, the opponent, the enemy, the cartel guys. It took, it took some time. At the start of it, it was just hopeless, just hopeless.

• 37:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 38:00Speaker 05

  Going through the motions.

• 38:03Speaker 05

  A few, I think it took about a year into it that a few of my friends were killed. Uh, they used to, they used to rent out hotels for us to stay in. And we had this buddy system going on, so if you wanted to go outside, you had to have one of, one of buddy system, right? But you would have to inform that you were going out. They didn't inform, they went to the store, thought it was easy, so they just crossed the street, went to this uh, convenience store.

• 38:31Speaker 05

  And they got picked up by uh, some cartel guys dressed as federal agents. They had the blue uniforms and everything. With the patches, everything, like down to every detail. And they were, you know, they were taken, zip dyed, um, and put into a van. They were found 24 hours later. One of them had his ID screwed to his forehead.

• 38:57Speaker 05

  They were being hunted.

• 38:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 05

  You know, that's, that's when like paranoia.

• 39:07Shawn Ryan?

  Less than a year.

• 39:08Speaker 05

  That's less than a year. And I, uh, I came out of there in a generation of thirty-two people. And a lot of them are gone.

• 39:20Speaker 05

  But those were the first really close ones to me that I saw leave, just leave in a horrible way.

• 39:29Speaker 05

  They're all young, you know, like I knew, I knew, like I'd just been to a, to a party with the girl, and I met the girlfriend of one of them. And it was, it was a thing I told them, get, don't, don't marry, don't get girlfriends because you don't want to leave widows.

• 39:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 39:45Speaker 05

  Interesting, uh, just for perspective. It's a, it's a thing to be ashamed of or to hide if your profession is a cop, or at least it was back then.

• 39:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 39:58Speaker 05

  So because we're not the, depending on where you were, cops are, you know, despised.

• 40:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 40:08Shawn Ryan?

  So what, what would a typical day look like? What was your mission?

• 40:13Speaker 05

  Uh, it depend on the time of my career, like, uh, some of the harder, hardcore stuff. I was attached to a, a director, uh, by the name of Lieutenant Colonel Lezola, uh, for, for, for the first, uh, part of his, uh, administration as directing us. He's the one that really changed things, like he was our, uh, he was the guy, you know? I was equate him to a, a general Mathis-type individual.

• 40:44Speaker 05

  He was a lieutenant colonel that, uh, came out of the war college in Mexico. A career officer, um, went through a bunch of, uh, experience and eventually let, uh, landed at, in a directorship out of the group that I worked for. He led from the front, you know? I didn't have any, any specialty training, uh, protecting somebody, but I got assigned to his, uh, security detail at the start of his, uh, at, at, at the start of his, uh, turn as a director. And I went out patrolling with him in Tijuana. That was probably one of the most life-changing, altering experiences.

• 41:23Speaker 05

  Um, there's this guy, you see this guy, he refused to wear a, a, um, a, a, um, a strap on his rifle so he would carry his AR in his hand, you know? Like a cowboy.

• 41:36Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 41:38Speaker 05

  He would walk out of these vehicles and every now and then would stop a high level cartel guy and he would walk up to him and like, I'm here now. I'm in charge. So you better, you know, better get your shit together. He's not coming after you. He would have these meetings with the whole group and just say, uh, I want villains. I want, I want to fight fire with fire. Uh, if you're here for romantic reasons, just get the fuck out of the room. Uh, I want bodies, not detainees.

• 42:06Shawn Ryan?

  Did you like working for him?

• 42:08Speaker 05

  Uh, I mean, I think, uh,

• 42:13Speaker 05

  he treated us like dog shit, but we felt the support.

• 42:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 42:18Speaker 05

  He, he was a very much a villain.

• 42:20Shawn Ryan?

  He's got your fucking back.

• 42:21Speaker 05

  But he was very much a villain, but he was our villain.

• 42:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 42:25Speaker 05

  That's the feeling we got.

• 42:27Shawn Ryan?

  The loyalty.

• 42:27Speaker 05

  For that, uh, for that, uh, we would always see him in the front lines. Uh, we did this, uh, raid on his compound in Baja where the, uh, guns, drugs, everything was going on, stolen vehicles, uh, money, uh, falsification, they were falsifying bills and it was insane compound we found out there.

• 42:53Speaker 05

  And, uh, they actually had a line in there as well, which that's a good, interesting part of the story. Uh, but when we went there, all of us that basically approached it from different sides and I remember approaching it from the beach and we were kind of walking towards this, uh, compound that had a base, a bunch of bungalows there. Uh, some of the bungalows were actually rented out and some American families were staying there unbeknownst to them. There was all this stuff going on around them. Uh, so, um, I remember being very low to the ground and hearing some rounds go off and stuff like that. And just being very low, kind of approaching this place and just looking to my sides and seeing this, this, uh, superhero character in the form of Lieutenant Colonel Liza Ollie just standing there.

• 43:38Speaker 05

  He said, the rounds are coming through.

• 43:42Speaker 05

  Like, uh, you can't make this shit up.

• 43:46Speaker 05

  Uh, we, we hit this place and, you know, he was with us throughout. He's not, he didn't, you know, didn't hide somewhere, go to the background and he was with us for all of it, you know, to probably one of the longest, uh, Longest days as far as kicking doors and that I had in my life. There's a bunch of bungalows. Each time we would hit one, there was people and there was weird things and there were guns. Whatever. We hit all these bungalows. At the end of it, there was this weird door, like a steel door with a refrigerator with a bunch of suckling, frozen suckling pigs and I was like, what's going on here? Right? I remember I had my MP5 with a light on it. One of the, one of the

• 44:29Speaker 05

  the stream light ones, the first ones, the yellowish light. You remember those? I don't know how we live with that and stuff. Turn on that yellowish light, you know, with these really expensive batteries to get down there.

• 44:42Speaker 05

  Open the steel door and go in there. And in the corner, like something out of a movie, this furry object just stood. And turn around, I could see its lights, his eyes light up. The light was a lion. They had a Holy shit. They had a pit lion because cartels.

• 45:05Speaker 05

  They did one of those. And you got a fucking MP5? I have an MP5 and, and, and I didn't, I didn't, in my mind, I'm, I'm not. One of the last things I thought about was shooting it. Yeah. I just wanted to get out of the room. That was my whole thing. Ran out of the room, closed the door.

• 45:24Speaker 05

  It's like, and then we had the, the whole thing about now, what do we do with this lion? Right? Lieutenant Colonel Lee's all that walks in. I was like, what's in there? It's a lion. Okay. Don't open the door. We won't.

• 45:39Speaker 05

  Right? I'm calm, collected guy. I mean, some of the things that we experienced were completely out of this world. I never saw him bat an eye.

• 45:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, that was, that was, I think he was instrumental in, in turning the fear on the side of them. Yeah. He had about eight or nine assassination attempts on him during his time uh, working down there. Shit. Uh, the last one took it, took the, took, uh, the use of his legs. Uh, he shot him in the back. Um, he's confined to a wheelchair now, but he's still.

• 46:16Speaker 05

  He's still very much a dangerous person. He's still very much a motivated guy. He's made a run for for office for the mayor of Tijuana a few times. Actually, I've supported him during these runs, even out, you know?

• 46:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 46:34Speaker 05

  He's one of those, he's one of those guys that never acknowledges people, you know? He's like one of those leaders that any small hint of a pat on the back is just beyond him.

• 46:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 46:45Speaker 05

  But he shared, when I was, when I was, started getting a bit more notoriety, he shared something of mine on his social media and said, oh, this man used to, this, this, this is one of the guys that I used to work with. Should listen to him. He's talking about some of the work we did. And that was like a insanely surreal.

• 47:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Speaker 05

  The disacknowledgement of my existence.

• 47:07Shawn Ryan?

  That felt awesome.

• 47:08Speaker 05

  That was the beyond awesome. And then, you know, and then I, then I went over there and talked to him and he humbled me back again. What's your name again?

• 47:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:21Shawn Ryan?

  When you guys were doing, when you guys were conducting these raids, like this one that you were just talking about, for example, how many guys are with you and how many guys were on the cartel side?

• 47:34Speaker 05

  I mean, usually somewhere in the numbering in the thirties or fifties on our side, if it was a high level thing. And somewhere around fifty and a hundred on the cartel side, depending on where we were and what we were doing. There were a lot of times we were outnumbered, completely outnumbered, surrounded. We had to basically adopt a defensive position and just wait it out. Till, till the cavalry came in, usually in the form of the, in the army or the Marines, depending on where we were.

• 48:03Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so you guys would take a target down and then, and then basically hand it over to a

• 48:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:09Shawn Ryan?

  a less specialized unit?

• 48:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we would find things that were beyond the scope of our ability to guard or keep or move.

• 48:18Shawn Ryan?

  Like a fucking lion?

• 48:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, like a lion or like a lot of cocaine or a lot of weed or a lot of guns and a lot of people. And then we'd call in the military and the military would come in and grab it. And there was, back then, there was a political thing. So, the military, they wanted, they wanted people to get more confidence in the ability of the military to combat, that the military was combating some of this stuff. The thing is that the military was not equipped to combat some of this stuff. Uh, they didn't, they weren't, uh, they weren't a viable police force. But they wanted to gain more confidence. So, a lot of the jobs that we would get, we would find, would say, hey, we found all this stuff. But the military, you know, take it.

• 48:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 48:57Speaker 05

  That was a lot of that going on back then. And there was a lot of corruption as well, um, at high levels. Uh, recently, the, uh, the head of the National Security Administration or Police Force in Mexico, under the Calderon administration, was arrested for cartel ties. So, I mean, again, trust no one.

• 49:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 49:18Speaker 05

  Trust no one. Uh, so, digging back on that, we, we would, uh, you know, sometimes we would, we would go after certain things and they would be called off. So, that, that makes you think.

• 49:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 49:31Speaker 05

  Right? Uh, but I was just a cog in the machine, you know? Boots on the ground.

• 49:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 49:35Speaker 05

  That's all I was.

• 49:37Shawn Ryan?

  How often were you guys going on raids? Was it every night?

• 49:39Speaker 05

  Every night.

• 49:40Shawn Ryan?

  Twice a night?

• 49:41Speaker 05

  Every night. Every night we would get something of interest and off we went. Or we would get anonymous reports of armed people somewhere or whatever. And, uh, it was basically a race to see who get, who could get there first. Or it was a race to see what we could find first, right? So, um, it was a nightly thing. A bunch of the people that I used to work with were all addicted to the same thing. Adrenaline. Um, they, they all wanted to be in it. They all wanted to be, you know, some people were coming off a shift and they, they were, they would hear something was going on and just flip that back on.

• 50:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 50:17Speaker 05

  Um, there's something to be said about the people you meet and you relate and with, uh, under some of these conditions. There's a weird bond that happens with people. So, we took everything personally that would happen to each of us. So, things like having, um, going off shift and, you know, whatever happens on, like, people would rush in, even on their breaks, you know? But it was a nightly thing. We would get, um, specific things that we would go after, specific people. Or we would, um, Jalal la hebra, as they call him down there, would pull the string, could find a guy with a cellphone. And the cellphone had him with an AK, a gold AK on it.

• 51:00Speaker 05

  And that would lead us to somebody else, and that would lead us to a house. And that would lead us to two water barrels buried with a bunch of guns from Fast and the Furious in his backyard. And that will lead us to somebody else. And it was, sometimes it's one, one thing would turn into a couple of, three nights of just raiding, hitting houses all at once.

• 51:24Shawn Ryan?

  Was there always shots fired?

• 51:26Speaker 05

  Sometimes, a lot, a lot of times. I was, I was in a few big ones.

• 51:32Speaker 05

  There's one famous one, La Cúpula. People can look this up, there's a lot of footage of that. La Cúpula was basically a castle-like structure, house in Tijuana. It had a giant dome on top of it, looked like a mosque. There was a report of armed people inside of it, so responding units went there and they started getting fire from on top of that Cúpula structure. So high vantage point, all of the advantages. So they got pinned down. Some of the, some of the federal police showed up and then we showed up. We had G3s back then, so they were pretty good at shooting people.

• 52:13Speaker 05

  That were hiding behind bricks.

• 52:18Speaker 05

  Some of the other guys had ARs and stuff like that, so it was an interesting back and forth in that, in that regard.

• 52:28Speaker 05

  Back then, the, all of the police units showed up, like from the federal to the state, to the local. And finally, the army showed up with a 50 cal.

• 52:40Shawn Ryan?

  This is the same fight?

• 52:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:42Shawn Ryan?

  How long did this go on?

• 52:43Speaker 05

  It probably took probably like four hours, maybe?

• 52:46Shawn Ryan?

  Four hours?

• 52:46Speaker 05

  Or five hours. And this is in the middle of Tijuana. There's a, there's a, there's a daycare center next to it.

• 52:52Shawn Ryan?

  Jesus.

• 52:53Speaker 05

  So we're evacuating some of the kids out of the daycare center. Uh, this time I was protecting a, a high-ranking politician, so we had access to armored suburbans. So we're bringing in the armored suburbans to see if we can evacuate some of these kids. It was a shit show. Everybody was shooting. Nobody knew who, like, some of the people who were showing up, there were cops, were wearing civilian clothing, including us. So it was a shit show. Um, eventually it subsided and on the inside, uh, opened up the, some of the doors and the army broke in and opened some of the doors, uh, to this place and, uh, a, a, a fully-uniformed municipal police officer stepped out. It's like, I jumped the wall from back then.

• 53:38Speaker 05

  Let's go through here. And like, all of us were like, that guy's probably part of that group over there. So he immediately got bagged. Um, and when they went in, um, a lot of the, uh, all of the, it was basically a place where they were keeping abducted people that they were ransoming out. And a lot of them got, you know, shot in the head. Uh, and some of the guys that were inside shooting out, put zip ties on and handcuffs and pretended to be abducted.

• 54:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 54:09Speaker 05

  Uh, I remember somebody commenting on the fact that the smell gave them away. You know, they picked them up and they would smell freshly fresh, you know, not, you know, not like somebody's been sleeping in the same clothing for months.

• 54:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 54:26Speaker 05

  And also they didn't have any raw wrists with the restraint, so they immediately got bagged and tagged too. Bunch of them were cops.

• 54:34Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 54:35Speaker 05

  Yeah. Police radios and so we would use, uh, sat, uh, satellite radios, uh, mantra systems. Um, and they had those there too. It was apparently encrypted and very secure, but they had them.

• 54:50Shawn Ryan?

  When you were trying to evacuate, or when, uh, you and your team was trying to evacuate the children out of the daycare, uh...

• 54:59Shawn Ryan?

  Is there like a mutual respect between the police and the cartel on sparing them? Or will they try to exploit that? And then like what a lot of, um, what a lot of, like what Al Qaeda will do is they will look for targets, opportunity that are fucking easy, that will make headline news.

• 55:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:18Shawn Ryan?

  And then, uh, try to, uh, twist it so that it makes it look like we did it.

• 55:26Speaker 05

  I mean, there's, there's pictures online about that firefight. You could see some of the, uh, some of the, some of the agents, basically just two kids on each hand, just trying to extract them. Rounds were flying everywhere. Nobody was respecting anything. Uh, they, they were in a fight for their lives, were cornered. So you can, that was all they were up to. Um, you can see them trying to snipe specific things like we had the helicopter flying overhead and you could see them trying to hit that thing out of the sky.

• 55:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, there is, there is, they do definitely have elements of, you know, uh, hearts and minds going on within how they operate in some of these communities. And in some of the, in some of the places that we went after them, they were, they were, they were the police element in the community. They were, they were the guys that built the roads. They were the guys that built the church. They were the guys that would pay for the college educations of some of the kids there. They were the guys that built the school. Um, they were the guys.

• 56:29Shawn Ryan?

  And I loved them.

• 56:30Speaker 05

  Yeah. And that's, that's, that's true across Mexico. There's a few places like that in Mexico. Uh, I did a, uh, I did a class in, uh, Sinaloa a few years back at Culiacan. Uh, the, the, the center of the Sinaloa cartel, basically. Um, and I was driving through this road. It's a pretty rough road and all of a sudden turned into a nice road, very well lit, very well maintained. And somebody there told me, this is the cartel built part of the road.

• 57:03Speaker 05

  So in a place like that, who is the governor there?

• 57:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 57:08Speaker 05

  Cartel guys or?

• 57:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, some of these communities that they built, the build around what they do are pretty insane. You know, kids, kids rolling into a gas station with a Lamborghini Murciélago, wearing sandals, gassing it up and then driving it up to who knows where in the hills.

• 57:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 57:28Speaker 05

  You know?

• 57:30Speaker 05

  Kids just running around with AK-47s in the middle of town, guarding somebody that was high level.

• 57:39Speaker 05

  This is, this is the, that's why I call it the upside down. Things are flipped in some of these places.

• 57:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. How long, how long were you in that, in that element where you were doing raids on a nightly basis?

• 57:53Speaker 05

  Probably somewhere along, probably nine years.

• 57:55Shawn Ryan?

  Nine years?

• 57:56Speaker 05

  Probably nine years of that.

• 57:57Shawn Ryan?

  Nine fucking years?

• 57:58Speaker 05

  Nine years of that.

• 57:59Shawn Ryan?

  That's like 2,000, what is that? 2,700 something raids?

• 58:05Speaker 05

  I mean, I.

• 58:05Shawn Ryan?

  That's a fuck ton of raids.

• 58:08Speaker 05

  Well, that's when we, when we talked last night at dinner, so I talked to you about how's your knees and how's your back? Because that's usually, that's usually what goes.

• 58:17Shawn Ryan?

  How much mention planning goes into one of these raids? Is it like, we're fucking going?

• 58:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're going, we're going, figuring things out. We, we got, we got pretty good at figuring out how things were built and how a lot of the, a lot of the housing down there is pretty shitty. I mean, it's, a lot of the economic housing is pretty like cut and paste, basically. So we would know how things were built. Also, a lot of the shanty towns that we were working were very flammable. Uh, some of them were built out of cardboard or just tarp. So you wouldn't know what you, what you would get. Sometimes we would hit what apparently was a shanty town type house and then would end up in a marble floor, four-story house with, um, Doberman Pinschers that have pedigrees guarding the outside of it, you know?

• 59:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 59:08Speaker 05

  So we would never know what we would get. There's some, some surveillance went into some of the work we did and we'd try and figure things out. We tried to prepare as best we could for it.

• 59:18Speaker 05

  But we just, you know, I remember just experience would, would make us gather things and what we would carry. So I remember hitting this house once.

• 59:29Speaker 05

  Clear door there, just went up to the door, started banging on it, then crowbaring it. Angle grinder, eventually we ripped that thing off and it was a wall behind it. It was a fake door, it was a fake front door.

• 59:41Shawn Ryan?

  Shit.

• 59:42Speaker 05

  And we were like, slow clap, you know, just, I mean, we had to, you had to applaud that. And there's this secret door tunnel system thing on the back and they, nobody was in there when we got in there. Uh, ingenuity, basically, it was a back and forth ingenuity thing.

• 59:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:01Speaker 05

  We would, uh, we would, we would, uh, we would try and always figure out how we would get into some place or how we could get out of it also. Um, you would go to some places and it wasn't just that house, it was also the house next door, it was also the house over there. It was also the kids on the bike over there had a smartphone that called you, that called any of that sort of activity in there. So we had to do things like cut the water supply, the water mains into some of these places that we couldn't flush things.

• 1:00:31Speaker 05

  We'd, uh, have to figure out the ways of, uh, hitting everything simultaneously, so we'd have to spread out. Communication was a big issue. Um, and also imagine going and hitting several houses in the same area at once. Crossfire is a bitch.

• 1:00:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Speaker 05

  And there's just no way to kind of, to kind of figure that out at times.

• 1:00:54Shawn Ryan?

  So are most of these barrios, uh, are they, is the entire neighborhood on the payroll?

• 1:00:59Speaker 05

  Some of them are, you know, or if they're not on the payroll, they're related to them in some way. Like blood related to some of the people working there. So it's in their best interest to call in, hey, there's

• 1:01:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:10Speaker 05

  A bunch of weird cars here or some people that are not from here, moving in with guns heading your way.

• 1:01:16Shawn Ryan?

  And not to mention their support in the whole fucking community.

• 1:01:19Speaker 05

  Sometimes, yeah. Uh, so again, it's, it was losing battle.

• 1:01:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:24Speaker 05

  In a lot of ways. I mean, some of the success, we had The President Felipe Calderon recently wrote a kind of a biography on his term. And he specifically mentions Baja as a victory for him. And it did, it was, you know, we calmed things down in that part of the country. It was one of the only successes that, that, that his whole, you know, counter narcotic drug, counter cartel effort had. But it didn't last.

• 1:01:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:56Speaker 05

  It didn't last.

• 1:01:57Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that, that's huge. That was actually my next question I was gonna ask out of over 2,700 fucking raids that you've done. If you felt like you've made a dent and

• 1:02:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, it

• 1:02:10Shawn Ryan?

  But you did, and then it went back.

• 1:02:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I mean, the raids and then, then getting to work in, in, as a bodyguard and an advisor role, advisory role for some, for a governor that worked in, in Baja. And then trying, I'm just trying to figure out, you know, all the, all the effort that was being put into finding these two large groups of cartels that were fighting for the richest drug route on the planet. That goes right through Tijuana into the, into California. It's one of the richest drug routes for a reason, because it feeds the largest drug market in the world.

• 1:02:57Speaker 05

  In the form of the US and specifically California. So you would hit somebody high level, you'd send them to prison. And the next day, there's two more guys setting up. Or you pacified this area and all of a sudden, well, there's no competition here. So other forces started moving in discreetly and eventually would revert back to the same problem. I think the, I think the main problem is a lack of a long-term plan when it came to all of that.

• 1:03:37Speaker 05

  All the plans were five, six years related to the presidential term that was currently in power. So a presidential term would end and everything that worked got discarded. Everything that didn't work got discarded and everybody would start off from square one. An example, a simple example of this. Felipe Calderon decided to militarize the police forces. So basically turned them into more of a militaristic approach to fight some of these cartels. The guy that replaced him said, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna do something completely different. So they made a new police force and militarized it.

• 1:04:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Speaker 05

  And then the current administration is a leftist guy. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Very to the left, crazy guy. Not a very good president. He, the first thing he said, I'm gonna do completely the opposite of what all these people did. I'm gonna amnesty for the cartels. Abrazos no balasos policy, which means hugs, not bullets. We're gonna completely do something different. And the first thing he does is he forms a national guard force. And he puts the military in charge. So he's like, this is the same thing again, right?

• 1:04:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Speaker 05

  So it's a systemic form of amnesia. Every six years, they forget everything, they just do it over again. And everybody that was related to whatever efforts that succeeded in the past, get vilified or get persecuted or prosecuted. That's the thing that's happening now. So, one of the governors that I, that I worked with, a very honorable man, like, finding somebody like that in politics in Mexico was a rare thing. But I'd trust that man with the, with my life and the life of my family if I had to. He's a very stand-up guy. I witnessed, I witnessed his efforts. He didn't hide, you know? He really believed in what he was doing. And now he's being persecuted for cartel ties. Uh, which I know for a fact, the bogus.

• 1:05:42Speaker 05

  But it's a leftist president now. And he's going, getting, going after all the conservatives to the right administrations in his past. That's the thing.

• 1:05:52Shawn Ryan?

  He's not addressing the fucking problem.

• 1:05:54Speaker 05

  No. No, it's the easiest thing is to blame.

• 1:05:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58Speaker 05

  Who was before, right? So that's a...

• 1:06:01Shawn Ryan?

  How long did it take for, uh... It sounds like you cleaned up Baja pretty fucking good and made a massive dent.

• 1:06:09Speaker 05

  It was the most dangerous, Tijuana was on the most dangerous cities in the world list. It was number one.

• 1:06:16Speaker 05

  And it ceased to be on that list after some of the efforts that I was involved in and some of the people that like Lieutenant Colonel Lazola took charge of the local police forces there. He disarmed all of the Tijuana police force and cleaned it up, which was an insane thing to do. It dropped off that list and things pacified. Cartels, cartel members and cartel convoys ceased to be in the open thing. They would, like when I started, you would see these cartel, fully armed cartel convoys just in the middle of the day just drive through the city and abduct somebody and just take them and nobody would do anything. He put fear into the equation.

• 1:06:59Speaker 05

  That, that, that, that in the open presence stopped.

• 1:07:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05Speaker 05

  Abductions for ransom were a big thing in the, in the city. That kind of lowered and stopped for a while and then things went back to normal, right? So much back to normal that more, a lot of protests started happening to get the military to go back to their military barracks, to get the police to stop being militaristic and to turn it into more of a community policing force. So again, bad times create, bad times create bad men, strong men, strong men. A good times and we went into that cycle.

• 1:07:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:39Speaker 05

  And now we're back again into the whole, Tijuana is on the, one of the, I think it was last year was the most dangerous city on the planet.

• 1:07:47Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 1:07:48Speaker 05

  Murders per capita.

• 1:07:51Speaker 05

  And then there's a new generation cartel allyship with the Tijuana cartel that is fighting for control over Tijuana with the Sinaloa cartel. And it's back to square one.

• 1:08:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, damn.

• 1:08:04Speaker 05

  Seven, eight people die every, every night in Tijuana.

• 1:08:07Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:08:09Speaker 05

  Related to the cartel violence.

• 1:08:12Shawn Ryan?

  So kind of wrapping up your career.

• 1:08:17Shawn Ryan?

  You talk about kind of being recruited by the cartel.

• 1:08:23Shawn Ryan?

  And I kind of wanted to go a little deeper into that and I would imagine that you were recruited several times or had friends. You had already said that you had friends that have been recruited out of the out of the police or maybe the military and into the cartel.

• 1:08:39Speaker 05

  I mean, the offer was, it was an offer, you know, it was always hot, they were always. You would always get intermediaries approaching you like, hey, and like, this is much money. It's all it takes for you to work with us, you know, but you it was obvious to anybody, you know, as soon as you take an offer like that, you're owned, you're theirs. If you fuck up, if you're not useful, or if somebody finds out you're working for somebody that they're they're not a part of, you'll either get arrested and get killed by the rival group that you're working against. Or your career ends, right? So I got a lot of offers, a lot of them, I never took any of them.

• 1:09:22Speaker 05

  A lot of my friends and a lot of the people that I used to work with did. Or eventually will put would put into a position where there was no choice. Plata o plomo, silver or lead, Colombian term, but it's popular in Mexico. Another code for it was have one finger up and one finger down. What do you want? You want the, you want plata o plomo, you know, you want to be on the ground or you want to stay up here in the world of the living.

• 1:09:49Speaker 05

  I wasn't greedy.

• 1:09:52Speaker 05

  There's a lot of people that went into policing in Mexico that wanted to find a million dollars and bury in the wall or something or

• 1:09:59Speaker 05

  or just be on the payroll of somebody. I remember going to some of the meetings at the office and seeing you know, some new homers outside and some of the guys owned, it's kind of scratching my head at it, right? A lot of, a lot of us went through a certification process called CALEA. It's an American certification process. And with that, you know, a lot of confidence exams, polygraph testing, all this type of stuff, all of us went through it. A lot of people got kicked out or fired after they went through that process. Which to us, to me, you know, I passed, so I was, I stayed on, so I figured that all the people that had passed stayed on, they were on the up and up. But people can be corrupted like from one day to another, right?

• 1:10:43Speaker 05

  So we're careful about everything, but I felt a bit better that everybody was going through it.

• 1:10:51Speaker 05

  Administration ends, somebody comes, another administration comes in and landmark case declares everybody was fired based on the polygraph exam or the competence exams as unconstitutional. And all of a sudden, you have six years' worth of people that were kicked out of the job, coming back into the job, their wages being paid forward. And you had people that were suspected of seeing lower cartel participation in the office now, back at the office. So.

• 1:11:24Speaker 05

  So. It got, it got really bad.

• 1:11:29Speaker 05

  And, you know, basically brought into the office, all the work that I was doing ended. I got an offer to work for a single side of it, basically. They told us, hey, remember you're working here? Yeah, well, we're gonna work against these guys over here only, and we want you to come in. Okay, let me think about it. Basically, we want us to work against one side, which means you want us to work for this side.

• 1:11:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:59Speaker 05

  I resigned that day. And there was just no getting out of it or squirming out of it or going somewhere else. I didn't have any, all the people that I knew within high level government were gone because the administration changed. All the people that I knew in the leadership in the office were moved around and I just had no choice. So I went, went outside, got my resignation printed out, signed it, handed everything in, in the duffel bag, handed in my MP5, my gun, my badge, everything, radio. Got myself into a car, called some of my friends, my American friends.

• 1:12:35Speaker 05

  Actually, two, two of them went down there, kinda helped me out to get out of there. Marines, God bless the United States Marine Corps.

• 1:12:46Speaker 05

  And they helped me cross the border. You know, um, family in tow by this point, which was, uh, that was probably the hardest part. I had choices, uh, in the U. S. That I didn't have in Mexico.

• 1:13:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:02Speaker 05

  Uh, it wasn't a choice that I took lightly and it wasn't, uh, something that I wanted to do at that point, but I didn't have a choice down there at that point. Uh, most of my friends didn't have that choice. And a lot of them actually, you know, went, uh, got out of the job and seeked employment elsewhere.

• 1:13:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Do you keep in touch with any of those guys?

• 1:13:23Speaker 05

  No, it's a, it's, it's one of those things where like, uh, it's, it's, it's not, doesn't serve anybody's interest to, to make contact with these people.

• 1:13:34Speaker 05

  I mean, there's, there are people that I worked with for years.

• 1:13:38Speaker 05

  I slept on, on the same floors with them, ate out of the same tuna cans as them.

• 1:13:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:45Speaker 05

  Uh, went to some of their birthday parties with their kids and, uh, I see them rolling out there in some, you know, luxury vehicles, getting $12,000 paid to them every two weeks as a salary. Um, and working, uh, for some of the most powerful drug organizations on the planet with a lot of government training on their side. Uh, a lot of American government specialty training on their side. And just basically upping the game. Uh, we just went through the most, uh, lethal year to be a Mexican in, in the country's history. The most violent year in our history this past year. And this year is gonna beat that year probably.

• 1:14:26Speaker 05

  And it's being fueled by people like me that went into that fight, got all these, uh, that, all this experience, all these skills. And they're basically tossed into the garbage.

• 1:14:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:39Speaker 05

  As they would then flip to, uh, you know, the whole career path was just non-existent. And that's what's fueling some of this fight as well. You know, some of these people just, what, what else I'm gonna do, right?

• 1:14:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Speaker 05

  Um, there's none of them, none of them had the, the opportunity that I had, so. And I don't blame them realistically, I just can't blame them.

• 1:15:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, but a lot of them are out there.

• 1:15:08Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I'll tell you what, let's take a, uh, let's take a quick break and then, uh, when we come back, we'll kinda talk about the structure of, uh,

• 1:15:21Shawn Ryan?

  some of these guys and, you know, and then, and, uh, go into that.

• 1:15:29Shawn Ryan?

  There's a lot of people looking for land these days.

• 1:15:35Shawn Ryan?

  As we continue to, uh,

• 1:15:39Shawn Ryan?

  lose our freedoms. So, we're on our way to look at a piece of property out in the middle of nowhere. And, uh, this particular piece only sits on an acre and a half, I believe, 1.5 acres.

• 1:16:04Shawn Ryan?

  Alright Ed, we're back from the break and, uh, I wanna kinda go into some of the structure of the cartels and, uh, and then I got like a hodgepodge of questions that are just a bunch of random shit, but, um, you kinda talked about how fast they bounced back, um, after the, after the, uh, political leaders changed, uh, with the different strategy and just to kinda put that in perspective for the audience, I read something, uh, when I was rea-, it may have been in a documentary, I can't remember, but it was talking about a, a family that was running basically like a, just a small family cocaine operation out of Mexico.

• 1:16:45Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, sounded like there's maybe five to 10 family members and within a few years that had grown into, uh, cartel organization that was over 100,000, uh, with over 100,000 members of that cartel and, uh, so just to kinda put that in perspective for the audience on how fucking big that is, that Google employs 108,000 people. So, within a few years, um...

• 1:17:16Shawn Ryan?

  They grew that cartel into basically an organization as fucking powerful as Google. And the only way they could have done that is by the demand. Which is one of the first things I want to ask is how much of that demand is coming to the United States versus Canada versus Europe? Are we the number one consumer?

• 1:17:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, yes. So consumer, the US market is what drives most of the growth with some of these organizations have. Most of it comes to the US. A lot of it actually goes to places like Europe.

• 1:17:58Speaker 05

  There's been a recent upsurge in nautical trips between, you know, Latin America into places like Africa that then get unloaded in Africa and then get sent over to Europe, right? That's one of the routes that it's taken. Canada as well. I mean, it's a growing drug market. Canada has one of the fastest growing drug markets out there right now. So a lot of that is fueling some of these smaller organizations growing, right?

• 1:18:30Speaker 05

  Another thing that's fueling them is their ability to also make a living off their environment. Mexico itself is a giant drug market. That's a lot of, that's one of the things a lot of people don't talk about as well.

• 1:18:44Speaker 05

  Tijuana is an example of this. And most of the killings are happening between

• 1:18:51Speaker 05

  rival cartels in Tijuana, killing off the local sellers of each other's sides. So most of the people that die during the night in Tijuana is like seven to eight or something like that every night. They're in different sales points in Tijuana where they're selling there locally. So that also feeds their organizations. They also have money within legitimate businesses. From, you know, there's a few tequila companies out there that have been linked to people like El Chapo's family.

• 1:19:24Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:19:24Speaker 05

  So it's legitimate money growing out of some of these. I think George Clooney sold his tequila company for about a billion or something like that. So you can imagine some of the money being made legally through some of their influences and some of the properties they can buy with some of the money generated from trafficking drugs into the US.

• 1:19:45Shawn Ryan?

  They sound pretty diversified and I want to get into that in a minute, but you were talking about a lot of the violence in Tijuana is cartel on cartel. And the way I just took what you said is they're killing each other's lowest level.

• 1:20:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:20:00Shawn Ryan?

  Guys, the street.

• 1:20:02Speaker 05

  Their most exposed level, which is their sales points, local sales points.

• 1:20:05Shawn Ryan?

  So how, how are they identifying each guy?

• 1:20:08Speaker 05

  Like. You follow, you follow the user.

• 1:20:11Shawn Ryan?

  Is you follow the user?

• 1:20:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, and they're pretty easy to spot.

• 1:20:15Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:16Speaker 05

  You follow the user and there's a, I'm sorry about the French that I keep saying, you know, it's bad words, but they're the words that we used to use when we worked. If you want to find somebody, find where they sleep, work and fuck. When I say fuck, I mean where they partake in their vices. So like even we would follow the people that were, you know, we recognized as users, we'd follow them around and we immediately recognize sales points. So traditionally, most of the sales points in Tijuana specifically, they're all kind of on the outskirts of the city. Like in the eastern part of the city or some of the older, older parts of the city that are on the hillsides.

• 1:21:01Speaker 05

  Tijuana has a river going through it, so that's where most of the downtown more developed parts are. So people want to buy, they go into the hillsides and then come back.

• 1:21:09Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:09Speaker 05

  So that's where most of the killing is happening, mostly, you know, again, sales points. And they identify each other because, you know, and grab a junkie off the street, where are you buying it? Over there, that's not one of our guys.

• 1:21:22Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, I guess what I was uh kinda going towards is do they have a any specific markings for different cartels like?

• 1:21:31Speaker 05

  No, they've become very good at not doing that. From tattoos, they used to be a big culture with criminal, Mexican criminal organizations having tattoos or markings of some kind.

• 1:21:47Speaker 05

  We would find people that had like spots where they mechanically or chemically removed tattoos and it was like a standing order within some of the organizations.

• 1:21:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:57Speaker 05

  So they're very good at that and detaching themselves from some of these uh sales points.

• 1:22:02Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:03Speaker 05

  So the high level distributors will give them to give the loads that are gonna be sold in different ports of parts of the city to somebody else that is unattached to the distributor. It's like a waypoint, so they'll give them that and they'll go and hand it over and somebody else will get the money. So they attach those two points. All communication goes through paper notes and or cell phones that get changed on a daily basis, that type of stuff.

• 1:22:31Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:31Speaker 05

  So, but they're very good bookkeepers. I mean, they're like, if you miss 20 pesos an hour, you're cut over the day, you're gonna get a visit by somebody.

• 1:22:42Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. It just seems like killing each other off, you know, cartel versus cartel, the turf war, whatever it is that's going on and why they're trying to eliminate each other.

• 1:22:57Shawn Ryan?

  We just said, you know, one organization grew to a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand person strong cartel within a few years and when an organization's that fucking big, there's no way, I feel like there's no way you could possibly know who's on your side, who's selling drugs for cartel X and who's selling drugs for cartel Y.

• 1:23:24Speaker 05

  So they divide themselves up into cells, basically. So, an example of this was happening, what was happening in Tijuana back in 2008, they had a scene along cartel had a cell in Tijuana. And they had a lieutenant that was in charge of the cell that reported directly back to Sinaloa, to the head of the Sinaloa cartel, which was not El Chapo, by the way, as a lot of your US media and a lot of Mexican media wants to make him out as the head of the Sinaloa cartel. Well, Chapo Guzman was probably number three or number four in the whole scale of things. He was not the head of the Sinaloa cartel.

• 1:24:01Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 1:24:02Speaker 05

  But that, we'll talk about that later if you want. But what they usually do is they send out un lugarteniente, like a lieutenant, to run a cell. He gets fed money, he gets fed guns, and he gets fed instructions. His task is to secure drug routes, to attack any sort of rival enemies or people that are gonna wanna gain control over any sort of illicit or illegal activity. This includes human trafficking. This includes abduction for ransom, this includes stolen vehicle trafficking from from the US into Mexico, or even in Mexico when they steal some of the newer vehicles

• 1:24:43Speaker 05

  and traffic in some of the cars themselves, or they clone the serial numbers and send the cars all the way down to southern Mexico and actually come up with different paperwork for them. So that, their whole purpose is to report directly back to the head of the cartel, to control distribution, to control all these illicit activities, and to tax people, right? They have several arms within that cell structure. The enforcement arm, sicarios, the guys that go out and kill people, the guys that go out and intimidate people, the guys that go out and eliminate the competition. They have whole cells of people that just every night they go out there hunting

• 1:25:28Speaker 05

  rival distribution networks or rival cartel guys. That's their whole deal, right? The reason why these sicarios are hard to get is that they drive around and roam around without any guns. They find somebody that they wanna get after. Then there's two ladies, old women, probably in their late sixties. Drive up to them and hand over the guns that they use. They use them and they get handed back to these old ladies and they. These old ladies are conspicuously just moving about the city with a trove of guns in their cars. Or they just dump them, right? So that's the enforcement arm of it. And then there's the distribution and security arm of it. Uh, this distribute, they distribute the, uh, the drugs.

• 1:26:11Speaker 05

  They take care of distribution or movement of loads of drugs going into the U.S. And or money coming down from the U.S. Or recently, there's been an uptake in precious metals being trafficked from the U.S. Into Mexico as a way of payment instead of money. So like, uh, gold, basically. Um, so there's a whole administrative, the distribution part of it where they move money to the U.S. Uh, money from the U.S. And guns from the U.S. And drugs up into the U.S. So there's a whole thing there. Um, then there's the administration side of it. You know, people have to keep tabs over numbers. It's a lot of money, it's a lot of numbers.

• 1:26:50Speaker 05

  Um, there's a lot of people going around and, and, uh, figuring out, uh, what, uh, percentages of money are being, uh, taken in at certain times of the year so they can ask questions at the second time of the year. So like when the COVID thing hit, sales dropped. So that kind of freaked some of these cartels up and then they, they started, uh, figuring ways of getting around some of the lockdown measures by actually going door to door and distributing their product.

• 1:27:16Speaker 06

  No shit.

• 1:27:17Speaker 05

  So they, they developed this, uh, this drug over, basically, right? In some, in some parts of the country. So you have your, your enforcement or security arm. You have your distribution arm or, uh, distribution arm and, uh, and you have your administration arm, administrative arm. And then you have this, at the center of all this, there's the, there's the figure of a lugarteniente or a cartel leader. She had. He usually has other underlings that also perform leadership tasks. And sometimes these underlings don't know each other or don't have any attachment to each other. So it's like a cell within a cell.

• 1:27:53Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:53Speaker 05

  We would get somebody that was in charge of a group of forty sicarios. And all he had was a different phone that would be handed to him so he could get instructions.

• 1:28:02Shawn Ryan?

  How were they broken up? Are they broken up by region?

• 1:28:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, so like Tijuana, that when I was active, Tijuana was divided up into four pieces. There was, there was Playas near the beach. There was a, there was a centro, El Centro, or the old, and the old federal colonia, which is like, that's one of the richest drug markets. That's where the Americans walk into, buy some of their drugs and then move back, back to the US. The east side of the city, where a lot of the, the trafficking from within Mexico, like large drug loads would come, be stored there and then would get put into vehicles, put on people, put into tunnels, all that stuff. That's kind of the, the main, main part of the activity there.

• 1:28:48Speaker 05

  And some places like this, the, the older colonies and places like La Mesa, Las Huertas, all these other, other parts where they would have their houses, where they, where they would party, where they would hide. So you'd have these divisions and each of these divisions had their own kind of like head guy that would know everything going on there. He would have the police on their payroll, the, he would have the investigative police on their payroll. He would have people, he would know in the media that would cover up things for them. He would pay for certain election processes of the local representatives. So again, they were more connected than the self, than the phone company there. You know, they had all these connections everywhere.

• 1:29:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:30Speaker 05

  That's how they worked.

• 1:29:32Shawn Ryan?

  Backing up real quick.

• 1:29:34Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:29:34Shawn Ryan?

  You were saying lieutenants are kind of in charge. So a lieutenant of a cartel in a region would be in charge of multiple streams of revenue, which is mainly drugs and then sex trafficking, car theft, whatever else. Then they are also in charge of the sicarios, are also in charge of the, the, the trafficking routes. So this almost kind of sounds like maybe a corporate or maybe even a franchise model.

• 1:30:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:30:02Shawn Ryan?

  Where each lieutenant owns, or maybe doesn't own, but is in charge of.

• 1:30:11Shawn Ryan?

  His business model.

• 1:30:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:30:13Shawn Ryan?

  And then they have the exact same business model all over fucking Mexico.

• 1:30:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:30:18Shawn Ryan?

  Does that include the, uh, is it run the same way in the United States?

• 1:30:23Speaker 05

  Yes, uh, yes. So the, more so than a corporation, it kind of reminds you of some sort of underground government. Like because they, they not only provide money sometimes for things like schools and, and, uh, people's immigration processes or lawyers, or they also police some of the communities. So there's some communities that, you know, something gets stolen, they don't call the cops, they call the cartels. That's why you see a lot of these videos popping up online. Cartel guys giving the board, uh, against, uh, on some of these guys, they lower their pants and just, you know, uh, go to town on them. And they're, that's corporal punishment provided

• 1:31:06Speaker 05

  by a quasi narco government that is working in parallel with the government.

• 1:31:12Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:31:13Speaker 05

  So that way, that's, I think that's more equated to how they act. Of course, they're a business, you know, and they, the, just like the government taxes, they tax as well. So sometimes they task certain companies for protection. So there's a bunch of mining operations going on all along the northern border in Mexico. They're all, they're all taxed by cartels, depending on where they are, so they can continue operating. Um, and the US side, you get some of the same structure, not as overt. Again, they can't be as overt up here because you still have, uh, you still have a working government, you still have, uh, you still have a police force, you still have a federal police force that has, that isn't anywhere near as corrupt that is other parts of the world, specifically in Mexico.

• 1:31:56Speaker 05

  So there's, this, they work with fear here. Uh, but in the same way, they have a single lieutenant or cartel head that runs the operation very much like they did down there with a, with a, with an armed branch or enforcement branch or security branch that goes off and does things for them. To a distribution, to a distribution branch that takes care of money loads going down to Mexico, maybe a buying arm or an administrative arm that, that just gathers things like ammo or guns or whatever the, the people back home want, you know, sometimes clothing. Sometimes weird things like clothing or the latest and greatest, uh, Jordan shoes will get smuggled right where the, like, in the drug tunnels where the drugs come into the

• 1:32:39Speaker 05

  US. Some of the, some of those luxury goods might get smuggled back into New Mexico, uh, because somebody sent a shopping list over, right? Um, but they're, they act differently here in the US. Uh, the distribution arms in the US are usually done through other third parties. Not in Mexico, that's not the case. So, distribution down there is done by locals. They, they gather people that work for them as distributors. Up here in the US, you see a lot of, uh, of motorcycle, uh, gangs being utilized, uh, by cartels as distribution, uh, as distribution or local gangs. Chicago is a good example of this. Seen a law cartel runs a lot of their distribution with some of the local

• 1:33:21Speaker 05

  black gangs in places like Chicago. So, they use them by proxy because they're, they're aware that, obviously, I'm not gonna get a Mexican guy that works for, that's loyal to my cartel to distribute this drug in this community where he doesn't look or talk like the people there. So, they're smart about that. So, they go through secondary people like that here in the US. That's kind of what changes in how they operate here.

• 1:33:43Shawn Ryan?

  So, these guys, that they're creating their own, uh, they have created their own fucking government, essentially.

• 1:33:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:33:52Shawn Ryan?

  And they're supporting their local communities and they are-

• 1:33:55Speaker 05

  On both, on both sides of the border.

• 1:33:56Shawn Ryan?

  Are acting as, essentially, they're acting as law enforcement in Mexico. And so, these guys are probably fucking chomping at the bit right now for the police to be defunded right here in the US because they're gonna take a major fucking role in that.

• 1:34:12Speaker 05

  I know for a fact that most of the places where police, uh, police presence is lower or basically a nonexistent because of the current situation. I know for a fact that they've taken all the advantages to move product, to move guns, to move and do and clear out whatever they need to do in this, uh, in this time of the great law enforcement pause that the country's going through.

• 1:34:38Shawn Ryan?

  So, they're being extremely fucking proactive with that.

• 1:34:40Speaker 05

  So, think about this. The largest, fastest growing cartel in Mexico was this new generation cartel, grew exponentially in influence and power, not just in Mexico, but in the US during the COVID epidemic.

• 1:34:57Speaker 05

  Senior law cartel was struggling to get fentanyl for their product. They actually had to smuggle it from American ports down to Mexico, which a load was captured in Tijuana to feed their apparatus. The reason why that happened is because the new generation cartel controls the Pacific side ports in Mexico and places like Lima, right? So their distribution was clear and easy. You know, China was sending their stuff. They were getting their product and they were growing exponentially. So the pause only affected, you know, law enforcement in Mexico was also kind of paused a bit, but they grew exponentially with the shutdown.

• 1:35:41Speaker 05

  Also, the senior law cartel's capacity to meet demand lowered. Their capacity was uninterrupted and they've been working on growing their influence on the US side for years. There was a recent operation with about 86 of them or something like that by the DEA, including one of the head leader of the new generation cartels, kids, right? So they've been growing underground here in the US for years and that hit they had was nothing.

• 1:36:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, didn't even put a dent in it.

• 1:36:22Speaker 05

  They're growing. And again, the fentanyl heroin drug market now bogus fake pain pills coming out of China, also coming into the US, right?

• 1:36:34Shawn Ryan?

  I wanted to get into this, but fuck it, we'll do it now. China, when I was doing my research, it sounds like China's taken a major interest in the cartels in Mexico. And I've operated around China overseas several times and those motherfuckers are just as ruthless, if not more than some of the cartels. And they also play by no rules. Why is the?

• 1:37:14Shawn Ryan?

  Interest in China, or the, why is China's interest in Mexico so, becoming so strong?

• 1:37:21Speaker 05

  Uh, it's your Achilles heel as a country. It's your number two largest consumer of American products in the world. It's a very destabil place that's getting destabilized, destabilized even more. So this, this whole weird thought process that Americans have that the cartels are getting their fentanyl from China, from some sort of criminal element within China. Like, let's be clear. Nothing comes out of China, nothing happens in China without Chinese state being involved or knowing about it. This is a place where Big Brother is the real thing, right? Everybody's monitored. You saw it during the COVID shutdown, you saw it with the way they're handling, handling the Uighur population.

• 1:38:04Speaker 05

  So nothing coming out of China is coming out of China without them knowing so. So, all that fentanyl being brought out of China into Mexico, that's getting, being put into heroin or some of these fentanyl fabrication sites that are being found in Mexico now, with clear instruction by Chinese, um, laboratory specialists. That's not a private entity, that's not the Triads, or that's not a criminal activity. That's a state, Chinese state sponsored activity. It's clear state to anybody that kind of looks into this.

• 1:38:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:39Speaker 05

  Um, the, you know, one thing is regional destabilization. That's usually, that usually happens when they want something from that country. So, one thing happened politically in the, within, within the US and Mexico relationship. Uh, the Trump phenomenon, right? Uh, Trump came into office and said, "We're gonna take a lot of our business out of Mexico, gonna bring it back." That was one of the things he, that, that he said that was gonna happen and did happen. A lot of businesses, uh, took their, took their plants and, American business took their plants and companies out of Mexico. Instead of it affecting Mexico in a negative way, Chinese plants and Chinese companies replanted them immediately.

• 1:39:22Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 1:39:22Speaker 05

  So... Something happened in that interval where somebody on this side figured out that's probably a mistake and things started balancing out. Interesting thing to note, we currently have in Mexico a leftist president that is open chavista, is open Maduro supporter, but somehow there's an open and like very friendly relationship with the US when it comes to the president and Trump and the president down there. I think Trump is very much aware of the danger that Mexico was in with the Chinese influence and the foreign influence within the country. Another factor that doesn't get talked a lot about is that Mexico has probably the largest

• 1:40:03Speaker 05

  mineable deposit of lithium right on the border. China, through a Canadian company, actually won the rights to mine that a few years back and their mining rights got canceled. And I'm not gonna go into Alex Jones territory, right? I mean, the conspiracy part of it. Right where that mining discovery was made, that's where the Mormon massacre happened. So it's a key place and things happen there. It's a very strange kind of environment for all the influence and all the pushing and pulling that's happening in that area. Some

• 1:40:45Speaker 05

  of the people that I've talked to in the security field, some of the people that I've talked to in the security field, outside of the friendly neighbors of the US, like in Mexico, there's a lot of Cuban intelligence services, service operations going on all over the place, just like places like Venezuela. You can see a clear partnership and influence with China there, right? It's in their best interest to gain ownership or control over a place like Mexico, which is currently going through a lot of bad stuff, a lot of crime, a lot of destabilization. There's whole swaths of Mexico that are controlled by cartels. The new generation cartel, I think, in a way, is a product of that outside influence.

• 1:41:30Speaker 05

  It's the only cartel that grew during the COVID epidemic shutdown. That tells me that there's some sort of outside influence from China there.

• 1:41:37Shawn Ryan?

  Are you seeing a lot of Chinese?

• 1:41:41Shawn Ryan?

  Coming into Mexico and kind of setting up shop?

• 1:41:45Speaker 05

  The largest, one of the largest cash seizures was done on a guy, Jen Li Sagon, a Chinese Mexican national, somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred million dollars cash found at his house. He was trafficking fentanyl legally and meth creatures into the country under some sort of paperwork legality. So there's some shady stuff going on there.

• 1:42:10Shawn Ryan?

  How long has this shit been going on with China?

• 1:42:13Speaker 05

  As soon as, as soon as the US got a taste for meth, I think that's probably the start of it.

• 1:42:18Shawn Ryan?

  When was that? 10 years ago?

• 1:42:20Speaker 05

  Probably a bit more further back than probably 15 years ago.

• 1:42:22Shawn Ryan?

  15 years?

• 1:42:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. And then there's this been, this has just been exponentially growing.

• 1:42:28Shawn Ryan?

  Is it, is it weird?

• 1:42:33Shawn Ryan?

  How do I phrase this?

• 1:42:37Shawn Ryan?

  Are you seeing more and more Chinese peoples becoming like a common thing to see?

• 1:42:41Speaker 05

  One of the largest communities of Chinese nationals is, are growing all along the border.

• 1:42:48Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:42:49Speaker 05

  Right? So, I mean, again, this is, this is, I'm not, this is not something, it's not something in the realm of conspiracy. Like if you can, this is clearly happening out in the open in a lot of, in a lot of, in a lot of regards. And people can research this and see it, they see it for themselves. To deny that the largest cartel in Mexico has grew during the COVID epidemic because they clearly had a supply chain from China is to deny what's right in front of your face. To deny that more and more Norinco-made military-grade stuff is popping up in print places in Mexico is also missing something that's in front of your

• 1:43:30Speaker 05

  face. And to deny that, so how many people die from fentanyl-related issues here in the US?

• 1:43:38Shawn Ryan?

  Tons.

• 1:43:40Speaker 05

  If you want to confront a milit, the US is a superior military force.

• 1:43:48Speaker 05

  How can you corrode that?

• 1:43:51Shawn Ryan?

  It makes perfect sense.

• 1:43:53Speaker 05

  Generation.

• 1:43:54Shawn Ryan?

  The thing with China is they're fucking extremely effective.

• 1:43:56Speaker 05

  No way.

• 1:43:57Shawn Ryan?

  At whatever they do.

• 1:43:59Speaker 05

  They have a lifetime president.

• 1:44:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. One, one, one being they don't.

• 1:44:04Shawn Ryan?

  They don't fucking play by rules either.

• 1:44:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:44:07Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, you know, China will come in and, uh, they'll open a whorehouse immediately to start gathering intelligence because people are gonna go to the fucking whorehouse, they're gonna fuck a Chinese hooker, the hooker's gonna milk them for information, the information gets to where it needs to go, it happens like that.

• 1:44:24Speaker 05

  It's, uh, Cuban intelligence services that are operating all over Central America and specifically Venezuela. That's how they act, right? That's, they're, they're, they're, people are playing checkers with these guys that are playing chess. And they play the long game. That's, that's something I think the US doesn't get.

• 1:44:43Speaker 05

  Example, China has a lifetime president.

• 1:44:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:46Speaker 05

  Cuba has a lifetime regime with the Castro, with the Castros. They're playing a really long game against, uh, a, a, a, a country that has elections. And politics change every, every, every, every, uh, every four, eight years.

• 1:45:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:06Speaker 05

  You know, and, uh, and they see the, the, the clear line and divide. So, I mean, there's blood in the water. And I think, I think they can smell that.

• 1:45:15Shawn Ryan?

  Everybody's taking advantage of it.

• 1:45:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, and, uh,

• 1:45:20Speaker 05

  I got, again, foreign eyes, I'm like, I'm, I'm new here, I'm trying to earn my way into becoming an American. But I still have that outside perspective. People getting offended by, you know, the, the, the whole Chinese virus wording, or, or China isn't the villain and the country. People kind of coming into the defense of that. People within the NBA. Not wanting to speak up about China because the Chinese are the best, uh, one of their best clients as far as buying some of the rights to watching some of these NBA games. Disney.

• 1:45:57Speaker 05

  I mean, they, they can't say anything wrong, but how surreal is it that you can't speak, uh, critically about China if you work for the NBA?

• 1:46:10Speaker 05

  I mean, that is outside of the, that's outside of the realm of what I thought being an American was.

• 1:46:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:17Speaker 05

  Right, so, I don't know. It's a weird time. But I think that's, they're clearly waging some sort of long-term war campaign against the US and Mexico is being utilized as a, as a tool for that.

• 1:46:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Interesting. With the fentanyl, going back to that, I always, what are they putting the fentanyl in?

• 1:46:42Speaker 05

  Uh, heroin. Heroin and also, now they're, they're building, building or making fake pain medication. They're kind of basing it off some of the pill designs and very badly made. Seen some pretty good ones coming out of Mexico in the past few years. The back when it was active, they crudely made. Uh, but, you know, somebody hands you some pain medication in a dark room somewhere and you take it, you wouldn't even know what it is.

• 1:47:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:11Speaker 05

  Um, so usually, some of the heroin that's being grown in hillsides out there, weird phenomenon happened. California legalized marijuana, Colorado. A lot of places are kind of following suit in the US. So the, the demand for marijuana went down. It's not over though. There's still, there's still traffic marijuana into the US, which is pretty surprising. But, uh, a lot of the hillsides that were covered with weed back then are now covered in poppy fields.

• 1:47:42Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 1:47:43Speaker 05

  But the thing is that some of these hillsides have been grow, that stuff has been growing in those hillsides for decades. So the heroin yield and the strength of the heroin isn't anywhere as near as someplace like Afghanistan, uh, or some of the stuff that comes out of the, you know, Asia. Uh, it's actually very low quality and strength. So the cartel said, you know, just put fentanyl in it to give it a kick.

• 1:48:08Shawn Ryan?

  It just seems kind of counterproductive because heroin's already so fucking addictive, you know? And then, and then when you do hear of... You know, people overdosing on heroin, uh, a lot of the times, you know, comes out that it was laced with fentanyl.

• 1:48:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:48:25Shawn Ryan?

  So it seems it's, uh, I mean, I'm sure there's a reason for it, but in my mind, I'm like, why would you do that? Because you're killing the fucking consumer, which seems to be bad for business.

• 1:48:36Speaker 05

  Well, you know, they, they, they, they shifted to methamphetamines for a while. Like as their main thing and methamphetamines and cocaine. Uh, but then they realized how much of a grassroots effort there was in the U. S. To make your own. And I didn't like that.

• 1:48:52Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 1:48:53Speaker 05

  So they saw this perfect storm and window to just dedicate themselves to heroin, fentanyl, put them together. And a bunch of people that were on opiates already in the U. S. A lot of the, a lot of the crackdown that went on the U. S. Against the prescription opiates that were left without a product.

• 1:49:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:11Speaker 05

  And it was a perfect storm for the cartels to kind of fill that void.

• 1:49:15Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think this is gonna create any?

• 1:49:19Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think this is gonna create any problems with, uh, Afghanistan and Mexico now that they're getting into the opiate trade? Because that's the number one.

• 1:49:28Speaker 05

  Well, I've, I've been.

• 1:49:30Shawn Ryan?

  When it comes to Taliban, Al Qaeda, that's ISIS.

• 1:49:33Speaker 05

  I've been researching anything, so just to be, you know, clear and open about it. Uh, I have friends all over Mexico, a lot of them people that I used to work with, uh, and they're still active within law enforcement in Mexico, some of the people that I've trained, like I still go down there and train, uh, members of law enforcement and, uh, and some of the security forces. So they, anything that's weird gets sent to me, like horrible, from horrible videos to uh, Farsi translation books that found in the desert somewhere. Uh, so I've always been, always on the lookout for anything Middle Eastern in Mexico.

• 1:50:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:14Speaker 05

  Um, and interestingly enough, it's an open order within most of the major cartels that run operations along the border to not touch anything related to Islamic extremism or Islamic anything.

• 1:50:26Shawn Ryan?

  Why is that?

• 1:50:27Speaker 05

  Because they're, they, they don't want to, they're, they're afraid of the word. The designation. They're afraid of the terrorist designation. That's something that puts fear on them.

• 1:50:40Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:50:40Speaker 05

  That's something we thought, I, we, all those, I thought it was coming after, after that family was murdered on the border. And it's, it's, sorry for saying Mormon massacre, American massacre. They're, they were American nationals.

• 1:50:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:57Speaker 05

  And they also had Mexican citizenship. I don't care if they prayed to the moon. They were American and also they were women and children.

• 1:51:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:08Speaker 05

  I, I thought that was coming. I, I heard the designation, I heard the pressure coming on. And I said, that's,

• 1:51:16Speaker 05

  that's, I think that's going to change things, but it didn't, it was walked back, you know? Again, regional stability, I'm sure there's a good reason for that. But they're afraid of it, so they don't want to touch anything related to extremism. I mean, there's probably a few cases of them kind of slipping through the cracks or some smaller cartels helping out, some sort of Muslim group or something like that, but it's mostly like a touchy subject with them. They wouldn't, they, any, anything that smells of it, they won't touch it, or they will, they will take care of it themselves. It's not good for their business.

• 1:51:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:50Speaker 05

  So I don't, I don't see that becoming a problem.

• 1:51:54Speaker 05

  But who knows? This, this is called, uh, people are moving more freely

• 1:52:03Speaker 05

  in and out of Mexico now. Again, the government is losing a grip on its ports of entry. It's declining in some places. We saw this with the Culiacanaso incident where the government forces captured one of El Chapo's kids and were basically beaten by the whole of the Sinaloa cartel.

• 1:52:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:21Speaker 05

  So, you know, who knows? I mean, it could be something on the horizon.

• 1:52:25Shawn Ryan?

  It'll be interesting. I mean, they're definitely dipping into their products or into their profits by now. And, and the funny thing about, um, them is they only use that to fund their intention.

• 1:52:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:52:39Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and we know their intentions. And if they can't, uh, you know, if that takes away from the money that they're dumping into their intentions, then, I mean, fuck, man.

• 1:52:53Speaker 05

  It could be something we'll see in the, like, it could be something on the horizon.

• 1:52:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:57Speaker 05

  Again, I think, uh,

• 1:53:00Speaker 05

  Mexico is getting worse. There's, there's, there's no if ands or about it. And people blame the COVID epidemic as far as the economic downturn that's going through. I mean, the incompetence and the, the, the, the death spike and the violence in Mexico flared up way before that.

• 1:53:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:18Speaker 05

  Um, and again, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a clear, a proxy war happening in Mexico between, you know, two major, uh, forces, um, American interests and Chinese, uh, probably Chinese sponsored state interests in, in Mexico.

• 1:53:39Shawn Ryan?

  Roughly, how many different cartels, uh, are down there?

• 1:53:43Speaker 05

  I mean, it's different numbers.

• 1:53:45Shawn Ryan?

  Hundreds?

• 1:53:46Speaker 05

  Probably somewhere in the hundreds, you know, uh, five of us can form a cartel. Then we can be named, or like a cartel, be named an organized crime group and work in a town. And we're a cartel that just dedicates themselves to this town. So there's a lot of them, small ones.

• 1:54:04Speaker 05

  But mostly all the small ones by proxy work for another bigger cartel. So, yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of small ones that just hold control over certain parts of, of certain parts of the country.

• 1:54:14Shawn Ryan?

  How many main cartels are there?

• 1:54:17Speaker 05

  I'd say there's two major ones that people need to keep an eye and worry about. The new generation cartel. Cartel de Jalisco de nueva generación.

• 1:54:26Speaker 05

  A cartel that originally was formed as a, as an armed enforcement, uh, elite wing to fight the Zeta cartel when it was still, when it was still active, when it was still the major threat for the Sino Law cartel. So they basically, the Sino Law cartel basically made these, uh, this Mata Zetas group to fight against the Zetas. And, um, they turned into their own thing. They turned into a cartel. They figured out like, well, we can be cartel ourselves. Yeah. Okay. Let's, so let's gain control of, they, they came strategic control of places like Guadalajara, places like Colima, where the major ports are. So they basically can, they basically became the owners of the door for some of the precursors.

• 1:55:09Speaker 05

  And this was the start of the shift from cocaine to heroin, fentanyl precursors for meth.

• 1:55:18Speaker 05

  So they they got in at the right time to gain control of that. They've been growing exponentially. And it's not a it's not a cartel like the Sinaloa cartel that flaunts their lavish lifestyles and gold guns and fast cars. They're very militaristic. They're very low key in some ways.

• 1:55:35Shawn Ryan?

  They're smart enough.

• 1:55:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, and they recruit.

• 1:55:39Speaker 05

  They're always recruiting from military to police.

• 1:55:44Speaker 05

  They have legitimate training camps out there. You know, so we see we see we used to see these ISIS, ISIS, Al Qaeda training videos with the monkey bars. You know, that's happening now in Mexico. And then there's actually like camps with these guys go out and train. There's rumors of American, ex American military guys advising them. It's the only cartel in Mexico that's well, it's one of the only two only cartels in Mexico that has dominance over the skies, over their territories. So there's places in Guadalajara where helicopters don't fly because they they're afraid to get knocked down. They've already knocked down a few. So they're they're they're incredible force to kind of face.

• 1:56:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:28Speaker 05

  They had they recently got a crackdown from the government going after them directly, which leads a lot of people to think that the federal government in Mexico has a deal with Sinaloa cartel. So there's some sort of effort being done against just the new generation cartel because they see him as a threat. But they're growing. There's not there's no stopping their growth. And you you can see that a lot of that growth is directly related to their ability to get stuff from the Pacific side of the ocean. And that's one of the main reasons why it's growing.

• 1:56:59Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. You talk in depth several times about the Zeta cartel. And for those of you that don't know who the Zeta cartel is, they were started by Mexican, Mexican special operations guys, correct?

• 1:57:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:57:17Speaker 05

  Special Forces is a lot of groups right now within the military claim that title. Back when they were, when the Zetas came about, that's a, that's a generation of people that had the GAFE title. Grupo Aromobile de Fuerzas Especiales, basically an air mobile special forces group. Different breed of people. I actually had and still have people that I know that I, that I, that I work with every now and then that didn't go the Zeta route and remained on, different breed of guys. Mostly college degrees, university degrees. Some of them have master's degrees. All of them have language skills. That's how you know these guys are special.

• 1:57:58Speaker 05

  School of the Americas trained. A lot of them have pictures in Fort Bragg and some crazy places and received some crazy jungle warfare training in Colombia and other places in South America. So these guys are, these guys were monsters, basically.

• 1:58:15Speaker 05

  And they were on government salaries, which are pretty shitty.

• 1:58:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:20Speaker 05

  Eventually, the Gulf Cartel headed at that time by OCL Cárdenas Guillén, decided it would be an interesting thing to hire on some of these guys as bodyguards. So a former member of that group that worked for his cartel said, I'll help you recruit them.

• 1:58:41Speaker 05

  We went down there, made the offer, made the offer with money. All of them looked at each other and said, yeah, we're in. Empty out, emptied out the armory, filled their trucks, left on patrol, never came back. So all of a sudden you saw this high level, sophisticated, highly trained SF group working for one of the major cartels in Mexico.

• 1:59:05Shawn Ryan?

  And then they split off and became their own.

• 1:59:07Speaker 05

  And then again, just like the Matasetas from the scene of La Oca, I thought they figured out, hey, we're doing all the work, we can be our own cartel. So they split off.

• 1:59:15Shawn Ryan?

  They were labeled as being some of the most ruthless. Guys out there.

• 1:59:21Speaker 05

  I think they're, I think they're being beat by the new generation cartel now.

• 1:59:25Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 1:59:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, but they were ruthless. They were very cold, calculated.

• 1:59:31Speaker 05

  And this is, this comes from secondhand stories and some, some of the stories that I've heard from some of the people that belong to that unit.

• 1:59:40Speaker 05

  They would have this thing where during training, they would get a dog that they would, you know, take care of for a few weeks. They would sleep with and feed and all this type of stuff, name it. And then they would have to kill it and eat it after a time with random weaponry, crowbar, rock.

• 1:59:58Speaker 05

  So like, and if you didn't do it, you would get kicked out. So that's the type of individual that they were breeding, right? They were, they were desensitizing these guys. And then all of a sudden, imagine you're, you're this elite warfighter with all this training and all this oversight and all this leadership behind you and rules, all of a sudden, no rules.

• 2:00:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:23Speaker 05

  You're your own guy. You're, you guys are, what, what are the local cops going to do with their revolvers?

• 2:00:31Shawn Ryan?

  It makes, it enables the, uh, the operator to reach maximum potential.

• 2:00:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was, so they were unchained. Um, one of the things that I don't hear talked about much, but during a time, uh, the, the Zetas allied themselves with the Tijuana cartel to fight against Sinaloa. Zeta doesn't see a lot of enemies, long enemies. Um, and there was a prison break in Tijuana that was A-team level, like the A-team did it. You know, there's like, I was working back then. I didn't get to, to, to witness it, but I, I got there to see the after effect. Uh, Tijuana prison, um, ever seen the movie, ever seen the movie Get the Gringo by Mel Gibson?

• 2:01:15Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 2:01:15Speaker 05

  That's based on that prison. It's a very old prison. Basically the city grew around it. Uh, it's still active. It's been trying to get deactivated for years, but they haven't been able to replace it completely.

• 2:01:29Speaker 05

  A group of people dressed in medical garb and a few ambulances came to do a weekly transport of some of the members into their dialysis. It's like there was a weekly thing that happened at that prison. So everybody thought it was normal. And all of a sudden, precise, precise, precise sniper fire at the guard towers took them out. Explosives were used, small frame charges and paper frame charges were used on some of the doors. Angle grinders and highly coordinated escape from the inside and the outside.

• 2:02:12Speaker 05

  Full body armor in some of these guys. You know, they managed to take out some high level cartel guys that were inside in a very coordinated thing. It shocked everybody how coordinated it was. Long standing rumor is it was Zeta guys. Interesting little bit of information there. All of them were doing port down. All of them were port down, coordinated port down guys. All of them were using M4 specific rifles. All of them had exactly the same kit in the same place on their, on their, on their stuff.

• 2:02:49Shawn Ryan?

  So we know where they came from.

• 2:02:51Speaker 05

  As some reported, as far as what's being reported. Another small element that you can tell these guys knew what they were doing. They had leg holsters, some of them.

• 2:02:59Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 2:03:01Speaker 05

  High leg holsters. You know, high.

• 2:03:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, drop leg.

• 2:03:04Speaker 05

  Not the drop leg holster, like all the way down to the knee when somebody knows what they're doing. All of them had that high leg holster, just clearing the armor on some of them. And they were wearing the lab coats to hide some of that stuff and all of a sudden they start working. Zetas.

• 2:03:19Shawn Ryan?

  That's fucking scary, you know? I mean, do you think that would have been fixed if their pay would have been better?

• 2:03:25Speaker 05

  I don't know. In Mexico, everybody has a price.

• 2:03:28Shawn Ryan?

  Because I mean, I think it's the same in the US, you know? I mean. Guys aren't, uh, I mean, yeah, there are rumors of guys going down and doing shit like that in, in Latin America. But, you know, I mean, we saw big, we saw a massive influx into the contracting world from, from the US military. I mean, you can work US military and kick the doors in and that's what the guys want to do. They want to fucking kick doors in and they want to fucking kill bad guys and they want to feel that rush. And, um, especially towards the beginning of the war, you could do that exact same fucking job.

• 2:04:09Shawn Ryan?

  Um, not necessarily with all the same caliber of people, but you could jump over on some of these contracts and make, you could make an entire year's worth of salary in one fucking month on certain contracts as you could in, in, in, in an entire year at a unit.

• 2:04:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:04:29Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, and so, you know, there's a price there too. And, uh, I, the only way they tried to combat that was up the reenlistment bonuses. And, and so when I got out, uh, there were, E7 and above, I think was getting a hundred and fifty thousand dollar reenlistment bonus, but still even that doesn't fucking compare to the money.

• 2:04:50Speaker 05

  No.

• 2:04:51Shawn Ryan?

  You know, um.

• 2:04:52Speaker 05

  Uh, like, uh, salaries that I've heard from the elite guys, twelve thousand dollars every two weeks.

• 2:04:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:59Speaker 05

  Plus they kept to keep whatever they find.

• 2:05:02Shawn Ryan?

  Oh.

• 2:05:03Speaker 05

  So that's, I mean.

• 2:05:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, a little extra incentive.

• 2:05:08Speaker 05

  Uh, also Americans going down there, like I've heard rumors from specialty people going down and train, training people in Mexico. You see elements of, of that and, uh, everybody says, hey, they laugh at the fact that every now and then they find these 50 cows or these, uh, long range platforms out there without any glass on them, not these sites. And they're like, I mean, nobody was using that, right? One of the first things that gets, uh, repurposed by the military are the sites.

• 2:05:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:39Speaker 05

  Eotech.

• 2:05:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:41Speaker 05

  ACOG, right? So you get presented naked rifle. Uh, one of the things we saw in some long range, uh, we saw some long range shooting sites that were training themselves up down there. I would see see small elements of training and or some sort of specialty. Screws, uh, screws being painted, uh, on there so they know where they were. Dialed in scopes, uh, German glass, uh, um, spotter scopes found in conjunction with the with the long range shooting scopes.

• 2:06:17Shawn Ryan?

  So they have the dope on their gun. The dope is the calculations for.

• 2:06:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, dope cards, written dope cards. Well, the first time I found one, I didn't know what it was. I I'd send it to a, to a Marisoc, a friend of mine. And so what, what's this? Does this make sense to you? Ah, yeah, that's pretty cool. Where'd you find that? Oh, shit, that's not cool. Uh, duct tape, one of the things that I saw once, a duct taped to a rifle. So duct taped next to a rifle with the rounds on the duct tape. Which is a.

• 2:06:50Speaker 05

  That's, it's, it's a very small detail that, you know, people might not know about that openly, but it's a thing I saw. I was like, hmm. That's interesting. And a lot of these things I would share with people that I would train with later on, or we train us, or I formed a relationship with a lot of the advisors that would come in. I had good English, so I could form a rapport and I would share some of these things with some people up here and they would like freak out with some of the details that I were seeing. And right now, what I'm see, we're seeing is military grade night vision. Like, the good stuff, the twenty four thousand, thirty thousand dollars stuff. Being found randomly in places down there. So that's what they're doing now. CNC machines making lowers.

• 2:07:36Speaker 05

  Suppressors, high quality suppressors being made somewhere, cranked out somewhere down there. Uh, by some people and basically ripping off some of the major companies in the US designs. And remaking them down there, right? So that's scary stuff.

• 2:07:52Shawn Ryan?

  So there are.

• 2:07:56Shawn Ryan?

  They're getting the best training in the world.

• 2:07:59Speaker 05

  Well, I think experience, experience is a bitch of a teacher, but she will never lie to you. When you pair that with having a neighbor that has some of the best warfighters, I mean, the best warfighters in the world, that also get a lot of experience.

• 2:08:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:14Speaker 05

  There's some sort of cross pollination there that happens and you get, you get some scary stuff.

• 2:08:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:20Speaker 05

  Weaponized drones, that's we're seeing a lot more of those. So basically civilian, civilian raid weaponized drones with basically flying claymores, flying around homemade claymores. We're seeing a lot of those now.

• 2:08:33Speaker 05

  And the way they, the way they're utilizing drones themselves before an event, a criminal event. So like they're getting some of their, getting some of their tactics from something, from somewhere. You know, that's, it's pretty interesting seeing some of those details and how they're advancing. Meanwhile, on the government side, they're patrolling in uniform, in marked vehicles, in the same way they have been for the past almost 25 years. Nothing's changed. Just changed the uniform, changed the logo, but the same thing is happening. The same, they're operating the same way. There's no advance there.

• 2:09:10Shawn Ryan?

  So, so going back a little bit, you were saying that it went kind of from marijuana to cocaine to meth to heroin, heroin laced with fentanyl.

• 2:09:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, coke, cocaine's always been one of the biggest, cocaine, marijuana, right? Even poppies as well. But yeah, the fentanyl, fentanyl and heroin put together to make a solid product to fill the void within the, the, basically the prescription opiate epidemic that you, you guys went through. And there was, there was a crackdown on that end. So you found, all of a sudden you found this giant market where people want, so wanted that product. So they filled that void.

• 2:09:56Speaker 05

  But it's not just that. So the cartels just don't dedicate themselves to moving drugs around. They also, their local markets make the money. You know, protection rackets. Again, one of their biggest moneymakers outside of drugs is trafficking, human trafficking of all kinds. From kids to women to adults.

• 2:10:21Speaker 05

  You know, we, we, we live in a country, the US. We live in a country where people are talking about reparations for slavery. When there's actual slavery still. Yeah. In this country.

• 2:10:38Speaker 05

  Um, you know, California, very liberal, very, you know, interesting politics there.

• 2:10:47Speaker 05

  Has a governor that has a winery. That did not shut down during the COVID epidemic because there is, their, their, their employees were essential. Yeah. Essentially endangered, endangered, indentured slaves from Mexico that have to work. No shit. So anybody experienced any salad shortages, shortages in the US and California during the COVID epidemic? Wonder what that is? What? Bunch of Mexicans working in the fields legally, but legally. Yeah. That's, that, that, that is what, that's what's happening. That's a form of slavery, it's a clear cut slavery right now, happening in the US. And all these people are putting to this country by criminal groups that make a shit ton of money off.

• 2:11:31Speaker 05

  Ransing that ransom, ransoming them. Uh, to their families that are already settled here in the US. So let's say you want to come to the US and I'm a coyote. I'm a smuggler. I report back to a cartel because I can work if I didn't. Um, you're gonna pay me whatever money you can, five thousand dollars, maybe eight thousand, depending on where you want to cross. And what type of security you have as far as being able to live in the, uh, being able to successfully cross. Uh, or I can just go the, you know, the weird way. And instead of crossing you physically through the border, uh, to jumping the border.

• 2:12:12Speaker 05

  I can find a local like for you that has, that already has paperwork that lives legally in the US. Rent his ID, rent his license, rent his car, drive it down to Mexico, pick you up. Act like you're drunk and you can't speak and just passed out in the backseat. And, and share the legal legit paperwork with the, uh, guy sitting there in immigration. You know, let you pass. And then, you know, give those IDs back to the guy that rented them out to me. Damn. That's one way, or I can fly you to Canada.

• 2:12:45Speaker 05

  And you just walk down.

• 2:12:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:47Speaker 05

  That's and those are few ways that people get through. But there's a cost to it. Sometimes people can't fill or pay that cost. Some of the people you see in Arizona, New Mexico, those places where you find them in the desert. And the coyotes are crossing them. They can't afford that service. So they get, so I'll give you credit. You're gonna have to work in certain field and certain farm for a certain amount of time. Or your family that's already settled out there has to pay us basically a ransom for you.

• 2:13:17Speaker 05

  Arizona is the abduction capital of the US. Why do you think that is?

• 2:13:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:23Speaker 05

  Why do they find people, you know, in basically conditions of abduction?

• 2:13:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:32Speaker 05

  You know, human trafficking is a very real thing. It's a very horrible thing. Also, just indentured slavery is an actual thing that's happening right now in the United States. While all these people are protesting for reparations or for, for problems that happened a few, you know, a while back.

• 2:13:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:51Speaker 05

  Things are happening right now. You don't see anybody protesting. Governor Newsom and his winery that's open during the COVID epidemic for private events. You don't see any of that, you know? It's, it's, as a Mexican, I, I see these things and I'm, again, I'd scratch my head where, where the attention goes and where the eyes go. It's one of their biggest moneymakers. People trafficking into the US is something that feeds the cartel criminal organizations in the US. Just like drugs, but it's one of those things that doesn't get talked about as much.

• 2:14:26Shawn Ryan?

  When it comes to smuggling immigrants into the US,

• 2:14:32Shawn Ryan?

  what is the, why does everybody want to come here? Is it because, because we're supposedly land of the free and they want to live the American dream? Or is it because they want to get the fuck out of Mexico and they have no choice to survive but to come over here?

• 2:14:47Speaker 05

  Both.

• 2:14:48Shawn Ryan?

  Both?

• 2:14:49Speaker 05

  Both. And yes, the, the,

• 2:14:53Speaker 05

  when I'll include myself. We believe in the dream. We believe that this country provides an opportunity for people like me that have nothing. And I had nothing when I came here. All I had was.

• 2:15:08Speaker 05

  Thank God, I had friends, all of them were military guys. Uh, and it's, um, um, NSW member, uh, reservist, Dan Stanfield. He was one of the guys that gave me my first, uh, it gave me a lot of help and opportunities to be in the US.

• 2:15:29Speaker 05

  Um, and a bunch of Marines, again, for some reason, I'm surrounded by them and I thank God for that.

• 2:15:36Speaker 05

  But I had nothing, you know, now I'm sitting here with you and I have an audience and I go around the country training people. And I get to make a living off that and I support, uh, I support my daughter in that way.

• 2:15:52Speaker 05

  I could not have what I'm, what I have here back there. And if, if I were to, would have to stay back there, I would be dead right now, right?

• 2:16:04Speaker 05

  The, the vision or the dream of what it is to be an American and what it is to live in the United States is something very real and tangible to people in Mexico. So there's an element of believing in that the land of opportunity, the land of the free. And, and also, you know, and when, when I say, when I, when I, when I personally say the land of the brave. It's, uh, uh, that bravery comes with, uh, safety. I can, I can express something like all the things that I'm saying in this interview that would get me shot in the face.

• 2:16:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:16:36Speaker 05

  Where I'm from. Uh, I could say all these things openly and share it with an audience. I can, I can do that where I'm from. So that's a very true thing. And again, completely from an outside's perspective, it blows my mind that I can do this here.

• 2:16:51Speaker 05

  But a lot of them are free, fleeing from Mexico because of the horrid conditions that are in some places. Not all Mexico was a shithole, as, uh, the people up here like to say. There's some places that are amazing, but some places that do have a quality of life that is superior to places that I've been here in the US. Uh, you know, like I went to, uh, I went to, uh, I went to Detroit. You know, a few months back, and that was pretty shocking and somebody from the third world, and I'm from TJ and I said, wow, man. This is rough, right?

• 2:17:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:25Speaker 05

  Uh, I know that, I know not, not the whole of the US is Detroit. But but some parts are, right? So I don't judge the whole country for what I see there. The problem is that Mexico does have a rampant problem with this type of stuff and it's growing. And it's in a lot of places. Traditionally, Guanajuato, the state of Guanajuato, was one of the safest parts of the country. I wanted to retire to Guanajuato when I was older. And now it's one of the most dangerous states in the country. With rampant drug war going on there over control. So, yeah, people moving up here, and I can see, again, I talk to people that are going through the process themselves illegally. That's another thing. I went through the process legally and it was not easy.

• 2:18:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:10Speaker 05

  And it was long, hard on my, on myself and my family. And I feel like I earned it. Some people don't go through that process. And they, they live better than me in some ways, right? So that's an interesting, that's an interesting perspective as well. You know, I get called a lot of things like, you know, trade, race trader and all these things. And usually from second or third generation Mexican Americans. That's usually, who usually gets, where I get most of the hate from. None of them have, have actually gone through the process themselves.

• 2:18:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:50Speaker 05

  So I speak from pure experience. There's definitely a promise, there's definitely an attractiveness to moving to the US. I would not want to be in any other country. I feel like that this is probably the best place to be. And I want to keep it that way.

• 2:19:06Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I'm fucking proud to have you here, man. I really am. And like, I'm glad you made it out of there and I'm glad you're here and, and, and I fucking know Dan.

• 2:19:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:19:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I know Dan. So we'll have to talk about, we'll have to talk about Dan.

• 2:19:23Speaker 05

  Dan and Kelly?

• 2:19:24Shawn Ryan?

  Offline. I don't know Kelly.

• 2:19:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're, they're, they're pretty, they've been pretty helpful with my whole.

• 2:19:32Speaker 05

  Process.

• 2:19:33Shawn Ryan?

  That's awesome, man.

• 2:19:34Speaker 05

  Again, patriots, most of the people that have helped me out, contrary to popular belief, a fresh, off the boat immigrant to this country. And all the help that I had was usually from patriots and usually from service members. I don't know why, maybe it's because of what I did. Maybe it's because of some of the relationships I formed when I was working down there. But it was, it's been rough, man. It's been rough and it's hard. I'll say this again, the worst enemy of a Mexican is another Mexican. And I've, I've experienced that here several times over with some of the people that are up here or have been up here for a few generations. There's something about our, you know, there's something about us that we just don't, you know,

• 2:20:19Speaker 05

  give, keep each other a hand for some reason.

• 2:20:21Shawn Ryan?

  Doing my own research and kind of looking into how everything's run. It seems like a lot of the sayings and a lot of the, a lot of the way business is conducted through the Mexican drug cartels, seems to be a model that they may have picked up from the Colombians from, you know, back in the eighties and nineties.

• 2:20:48Shawn Ryan?

  Even the sayings you're using, I listened to, I think it was you talk about the cemeteries and how, how the cemeteries are split. And I mean, that's the exact same fucking thing. You have all the, in Colombia, you have all the, you know, the, the community politicians and, and all of police, chief of police buried on one side and on directly across the street is Pablo Escobar's fucking tomb. And it, it's, it's fascinating to me to see like, it kind of changed like that.

• 2:21:26Shawn Ryan?

  And I heard you say that a lot of the cocaine was going, actually like growing, was going up to Mexico. And they also, I know they also pushed a lot down to Bolivia and Peru as well, but.

• 2:21:45Shawn Ryan?

  With that being said, if the Colombians pushed the cocaine up to Mexico, uh, which seems to be uh extremely fucking powerful, uh way more powerful than them. What are the relations like?

• 2:22:02Speaker 05

  Uh, right now, it's down now it's going the other way. It's going the other way. The Colombians would come and um show Mexicans how to do their thing like back in the seventies and the eighties. And probably early nineties and now it's the other way around. Now there's legit cartel influence in places like Colombia.

• 2:22:21Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 2:22:22Speaker 05

  Directly at the source like um you can see you can see enforcement and ownership all the way down there. I'm not saying they're replacing all the local uh organizations, but there's clear influence going the other way. Uh, from origin points to all the way up. So some of the stuff that is being grown or taken outside of Colombia as far as growth. Uh cocaine growth is actually funded and supported by Mexican organizations because they see the potential to move production out of it, right?

• 2:22:51Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:22:52Speaker 05

  Uh, they're looking for ways to expand and modernize. There's cartel influence in Northern Africa.

• 2:22:58Shawn Ryan?

  No shit's gone all the way over there, huh?

• 2:23:00Speaker 05

  Uh, they there's a cartel group that a cartel uh cell that was captured somewhere in Australia or Indonesia or something Indonesia. And they were trying to figure out a way to provide a uh uh yeah. A uh source for some of the high level heroin coming out of that region into back into Mexico and then up into the United States. So they're looking to expand. They're like they're interna- they're international, basically. Uh, but what I see now is uh Mexico is taking a lead when all that when it comes to all that. Uh, from the origin and the production to the transfer to the transfer to even now in the US to the distribution side of it.

• 2:23:42Speaker 05

  Which is that's pretty telling as far as their influence on this side.

• 2:23:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, Pablo Escobar is, that's the guy.

• 2:23:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:52Speaker 05

  You can see, you see him referenced. And you see some of the things he used to do down there being replicated in places like Mexico. Interesting little connection there. Pablo Escobar was a follower and a very deep, devoted follower of the Santo Niño de la Tocha. A saint. It's basically an image of a child, a child like Jesus. That was venerated in Spain during the Moorish invasion. He was basically the saint of the persecuted. So Pablo Escobar would venerate El Santo Niño de la Tocha. When they caught El Chapo Guzmán's kid, in Sinaloa recently, that past year. And the whole mess happened where they beat the Mexican army.

• 2:24:34Speaker 05

  On his neck, on a scapular, it was a Santo Niño de la Tocha.

• 2:24:38Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 2:24:39Speaker 05

  Right, so overnight, that saint, that saint's stock rose. If you wanted to buy a scapular of El Santo Niño de la Tocha in Mexico at that time, hard to find like that one. It's like the most sought after item. So it was a revelation that it worked. A miracle happened. You know, this guy escaped federal custody. You know, the whole Sinaloa cartel came in and just, you know, defeated the army in a miraculous event.

• 2:25:08Shawn Ryan?

  So they fucking love him.

• 2:25:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's a Escobar, Escobar iconography gets found in cartel houses and safe houses and places like that all the time. Memoirs, books, pictures, tattoos of Escobar. That, he was like the guy that they, they all modeled themselves after. Now, now we're, now we're making our own legend, our own, Mexico's making their own legend, their own, their own figures like Escobar. With people like El Señor de los Cielos, with some of the people that were involved in the whole Kiki Camarena situation. That are, some of them are still alive and are actually still active out there.

• 2:25:49Speaker 05

  You know, so, so that kind of legend continues on in, in, in, in that way. And it's also being propagated by things like Netflix.

• 2:25:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:59Speaker 05

  So another thing, interesting thing you kind of think about is, you know, Narcos, the original Narcos made Pablo Escobar even more known.

• 2:26:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:08Speaker 05

  I was acquainted to the movie La Bamba. And remember the movie La Bamba?

• 2:26:13Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't, I didn't see that.

• 2:26:14Speaker 05

  La Bamba was basically based on this nineteen fifty's singer, Mexican-American singer, who died in a plane crash, right? Richie Valens. And every, every time I say Richie Valens or La Bamba, everybody remembers Lou Diamond Phillips. They don't remember actually Richie Valens. They remember the movie about the singer, not the singer. And in a lot of ways, uh, people that might have not grown up during the whole, uh, um, the whole thing with Paulo Escobar or the whole situation around Paulo Escobar, never knew him. All they remember is the Netflix series, right? All they remember is the series Narcos. Um, and it's in there, and it's in the youth. It's in the music. It's in the culture.

• 2:26:59Speaker 05

  It's in the narco cultura, which, again, it's one of those influential things. You want to talk about, uh, hey, when you were a kid, you watched G I Joe cartoon? Made you maybe some way convinced you to join the military later on in life? Maybe you saw a movie about some sort of badass military operation or something, I don't know, uh, that might have convinced you to go into that line of work? Well, now there's not a lot of that, but there's a lot of Narcos, Narcos Mexico going on right now. A lot of kids quoting some of the show. A lot of kids going into the culture, wearing the clothes, wearing some of the regalia. Who's your hero? El Señor de los Cielos.

• 2:27:36Shawn Ryan?

  Fuck.

• 2:27:36Speaker 05

  Who's your hero? Chapo Guzman.

• 2:27:38Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:27:39Speaker 05

  That's a different, it's a different thing. You want to talk about propagating. Now again, freedom of speech, entertainment, enjoy what you want. Um, but let's say tomorrow, cartels are declared a terrorist organization. So Netflix would now be showing shows glorifying terror, a terrorist network. Wouldn't that blow your mind? You know? But it's a thing, you know? Uh, it's a-

• 2:28:08Speaker 05

  It's it's it's it's an interesting it's an interesting influence and transference of Colombian Medellin cartel and and how some of them operated back then, how Pablo Escobar turned into this figure. And now how that's moved into Mexico and that's turned into another different monster, bigger monster.

• 2:28:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's fucking scary, you know, I mean, even the the fact that they've adopted the model where they, you know, give back to the community and make it seem like they're being generous when.

• 2:28:42Speaker 05

  Hearts and minds.

• 2:28:43Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, essentially, all they're doing is getting the populace hooked on the fucking tit. And they're getting free shit. They think they're generous. They fall in love. Life's fucking easy for them. And these guys can do whatever the fuck they want.

• 2:28:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:28:58Shawn Ryan?

  And combine that with the fact that how well funded they are. And then you bring in the training factor and how effective they are. I mean, this fucking uh, this is gonna be impossible to stop.

• 2:29:10Speaker 05

  Well, you you talk about, again, somebody, somebody very famous told me once, never read the comment section.

• 2:29:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:18Speaker 05

  But I have to sometimes, right?

• 2:29:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:20Speaker 05

  So every now and then I get these online operators talking, laughing at some of these cartel guys without any sights on their rifles.

• 2:29:30Speaker 05

  Like you see a, you know, see this this AR platforms, maybe a Draco little thing like that. And they laugh at it, ah, like, you know, you live in a gun free part of America, you know, actual free America. You get to shoot a lot of cool guns, invest in your guns and all that stuff. And you see a lot of people online that are influencers and shooting Instagram really fast and all the stuff on their guns. Most of those kids in those videos, cartel videos, without any sights on the rifles are actually gonna drop more people in their lifetime than most of these Instagram shooters.

• 2:30:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:03Speaker 05

  Because they live in a live environment. You don't need a lot of position when you just spray wildly into another group of people that you're fighting.

• 2:30:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:11Speaker 05

  Uh, ambushing, you know, the bad guys pick the time and the place. You know, the good guys have to prepare at all times for that reaction.

• 2:30:21Shawn Ryan?

  And you have to fucking fight with rules.

• 2:30:23Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 2:30:24Shawn Ryan?

  Against somebody that has no fucking rules.

• 2:30:26Speaker 05

  And he's gonna get a lot more experience in his lifetime, probably.

• 2:30:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:30Speaker 05

  I don't mean to glorify them. I don't mean to say that they're better, that they are something to be respected. But I think if you dehumanize the enemy, I think if you laugh at them or you discount them,

• 2:30:45Speaker 05

  you're dead already.

• 2:30:46Shawn Ryan?

  Or underestimate them.

• 2:30:47Speaker 05

  I don't underestimate anybody.

• 2:30:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:50Speaker 05

  I've seen, I've seen twelve-year-old sicarios with over four, five skulls on their, you know, on their repertoire as far as the people they've killed.

• 2:31:01Shawn Ryan?

  Twelve years old?

• 2:31:02Speaker 05

  Twelve-year-old, yeah. Twelve-year-olds.

• 2:31:05Shawn Ryan?

  When it's a twelve-year-old kid, is that a choice that that twelve-year-old makes? Or is it more like, uh, maybe the...

• 2:31:13Speaker 05

  Hey, we can't get close to that guy. Uh, your little brother, he's cool, right? Yeah, he's fine.

• 2:31:20Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:31:21Speaker 05

  He's just a product of his environment.

• 2:31:24Shawn Ryan?

  So this, I mean...

• 2:31:25Speaker 05

  Child soldiers.

• 2:31:26Shawn Ryan?

  Who reminds you of Africa?

• 2:31:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, we say child soldiers, you immediately think Africa, but you don't think...

• 2:31:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:33Speaker 05

  It's right down there. It's like right across the border. Child soldiers.

• 2:31:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:39Speaker 05

  Child sicarios.

• 2:31:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:41Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, and also kids at night in Mexico, sleeping in their beds, probably eight, nine, dreaming of growing up and being in the back of one of those trucks with an AK.

• 2:31:53Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's bad news.

• 2:31:54Speaker 05

  Or being the next El Chapo. Talk about the, uh, the, the corrosion of the culture. Just like, uh, you, Black Lives Matter, uh, defund the police, all these things happening up here. Nobody wants to grow up to be a cop anymore.

• 2:32:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:11Speaker 05

  Yeah. Nobody wants to grow up and be a doctor. They wanna grow up to be El Chapo.

• 2:32:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:17Speaker 05

  You know, they want their next, they want their next Netflix series. They want, uh, they want Sean Penn to fly down there and, you know, be on the cover of Rolling Stone. You know, that's what they want.

• 2:32:29Speaker 05

  Again, imagine if tomorrow they get declared a terrorist organization. Now you have a picture of Sean Penn shaking hands with a terrorist.

• 2:32:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:38Speaker 05

  Again, that perspective is all skewed.

• 2:32:42Shawn Ryan?

  When it comes to the sicarios or the assassins, and you've mentioned how religious Mexico is as a country, with Catholicism and everything like that. Are these guys still religious? I mean, you talk about the desensitizing too. And so...

• 2:33:01Speaker 05

  The desensitization I shared, those are completely different animals, different breed of people. Highly educated, trained, military. Those are more mechanical.

• 2:33:18Shawn Ryan?

  It's like us gone bad.

• 2:33:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's... I mean, if you want to see, you know, what you could become if, you know, that's...

• 2:33:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:28Speaker 05

  But you see certain elements of religion there, but not like you see in some of the sicarios that are kind of made. What I mean by made is every cartel has their own kind of internal narco culture going on in there. Some of them pray to different saints. Some of them pray to different forbidden saints. Santa Muerte, the figure of death, that is basically, that basically imbues them with the power to, or the authority to, you know what? I know you're Catholic, but you're under the protection of me, the Holy Saint of Death. So anything you do under my protection, God's not going to know about it. So you have clear field to do what you need to do.

• 2:34:09Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 2:34:10Speaker 05

  Right? So that's, that's like, that's the base of the faith when it comes to Santa Muerte. And Santa Muerte, like, people think Santa Muerte is like a Catholic thing. It's old, older than any sort of Catholicism in Mexico. If you kind of look at it, Santa Muerte, this figure of a skeletal figure with a robe on it, that's what she turned into during the 80s and 90s. But she used to be a skeletal figure with supple breasts and a skirt of snakes, two hands like that. She used to be Quatliqua, the mother goddess of the Aztecs. So if you think about it,

• 2:34:51Speaker 05

  the only surviving veneration of Aztec religion still in practice is Santa Muerte. And it's a practice that that has faithful within police forces, within the military, within high level politics and the sicarios. That's that's a lot of them actually venerate her. When I first started working, a lot of the older guys that I work with prayed to Santa Marta. They took me to a Santa Marta shrine and we we offered a offered her a bottle of Patron. I was like, hey, get a get a bottle. And I grabbed a cheap ass bottle, you know. I said, no, no, you need to get her something that you would drink

• 2:35:32Speaker 05

  or else it's not it won't matter. Right. And I was freaking out, you know, raised Catholic. And I was like, what the fuck am I doing? Put it there. And the older guy said, this is something that the other guys pray to in fear. So you need to imbue that fear within you. So where this scapular, where use this, I learn about this iconography because it's going to be used against you. So learn it now.

• 2:35:55Shawn Ryan?

  Did these guys get ritualistic at all? Like in Colombia, or in Medellin specifically, a lot of the assassins before they go on a hit and how they do a hit, nine times out of 10, there is on a fucking moped, you know, drive up, stitch you up. But they will all go pray at this very specific church.

• 2:36:17Speaker 05

  The the significance of the left hand, the significance of the left foot, the significance of of coming out of the ground, out of the grave. There's a there's a lot of ceremony that goes on in some of the more occult and kind of deeper levels of some of these rituals and some of the both on the police side, because a lot of these government organizations that I used to work with and some a lot of the police organizations I used to work with would take those things and imbue themselves with them. So I don't know, to equate it like people, snipers in Vietnam, eating locally and dressing locally and smelling locally, that kind of thing. So people say, Ed, are you like a practitioner of Santa Marta? Because

• 2:37:02Speaker 05

  you wear all the you kind of use some of that regalia yourself. It's our version of a captured ISIS flag. So we keep what we we keep what we get, basically.

• 2:37:15Speaker 05

  But some of the rituals that I used to see some of these sicarios guys do and some of the guys that I work with in police forces, silver was very significant for Santa Muerte. Probably because it has something to do with Judas, or maybe it has something to do with just the availability of silver in northern Mexico, and a lot of parts of Mexico is a very, very rich silver producing thing. But you would, when you would come into a job, a new job, you would get one silver coin, like a silver peso, and somebody would lean into you and tell you in your ear, when this job is over, you'll get another one. And the other one will be on your eyes or in your pocket. It's up to you to pick which one.

• 2:37:59Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 2:38:00Speaker 05

  Right? So that's like ominous momentum moiti that we would get. And when you would get into a sort of leadership position, I was, the highest I went was a regional sub commander. And the only reason I didn't get commander was because I was too young. And I got a silver coin at the start and got that ominous warning. And I managed to get the other one and put it in my pocket and just, here, you'll stay. You know, sicarios will wear silver, they won't wear gold, because they think gold is, attracts too much attention from the devil, which is kind of like, it's a, in Mexico, the devil is a different character. It's not like the devil up here, which is in direct conflict with God.

• 2:38:44Speaker 05

  The devil, and the devil in Mexico is very much kind of the, he's a counterforce, but he's also a tool that God uses to get people. So if somebody's doing something nefarious out there, he won't want to attract attention of the devil. Although he'll use the iconography and the benoration of Santa Muertes to conceal his acts and to give him authority over life and death, basically.

• 2:39:09Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:39:10Speaker 05

  And that's something outside of the norm. So you see a lot of ritualistic stuff in there. Silver grips on the guns, silver skull caps on the boots, silver skull rings, silver rosaries with black stones with skulls on them. You know, there's a lot of iconography out there that could be kind of look at, kind of tell something about the people. I do some classes with law enforcement, kind of familiarizing themselves with that type of stuff, but it's not out there.

• 2:39:42Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. Well.

• 2:39:45Shawn Ryan?

  I think that pretty much covers kind of the structure of the cartels and

• 2:39:53Shawn Ryan?

  a lot of that kind of stuff that covers that subject. So let's take another break and then then we'll come back and wrap things up.

• 2:40:16Speaker 06

  Well,

• 2:40:19Speaker 06

  my fires kind of suck.

• 2:40:26Speaker 06

  But my gummy bears don't.

• 2:40:30Speaker 06

  Head over to vigilancelead.com.

• 2:40:35Speaker 06

  Buy yourself a bag of gummy bears.

• 2:40:39Speaker 06

  And if your fires suck too. Get yourself a vigilance lead beanie. Keep those grapes warm.

• 2:40:49Speaker 06

  Enjoy the show.

• 2:41:05Shawn Ryan?

  Alright Ed, back from the break again and we're gonna wrap this thing up. But I want to cover two things and the first one being, how do you cope with all the shit that you've seen? We talked about

• 2:41:22Shawn Ryan?

  some of the stuff you've seen. We've talked about, you know, the disposing of bodies and some of the gruesome stuff that you've seen the cartel do down there. We covered the fact that you've gone on 2,700 fucking kicks.

• 2:41:37Speaker 05

  There's no numbers. It's just a blur of years and blurs. I don't know. I don't know how many of those.

• 2:41:43Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you know, nine years.

• 2:41:44Speaker 05

  That whole experience.

• 2:41:48Speaker 05

  Humor, a big part of it, I think. One of the things I've always recognized with all the people that I meet that have, you know, people like you that have an experienced base.

• 2:41:59Speaker 05

  Other people like that had, kind of went through their own thing. Certain commonalities that I see in people like that. Humor is one of them. Usually I can tell a lot about somebody if they don't have a sense of humor. You know, they take themselves too seriously, there's something, there's something amiss there.

• 2:42:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:18Speaker 05

  Humor is one of those big things that has helped me out, that kind of, it's a good mask.

• 2:42:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:25Speaker 05

  It's a good cloaking device, humor.

• 2:42:29Shawn Ryan?

  It helps get through the misery when you're in the middle of it, too.

• 2:42:33Speaker 05

  I listen to this, I had this, one of my closest friends when I was working, his name was Haharamio. Very infamous name, I've kind of made him famous. It's my way of keeping him alive.

• 2:42:49Speaker 05

  He was one of the older guys that I worked with, he was a mess. I mean, he was a dumpster fire inside of a dumpster fire of a person. But he was very loyal, and was a very good guy. Gave me some of the biggest laughs in my life, usually unintentional, you know.

• 2:43:06Speaker 05

  He, he'd always kind of basically, you know, keep me laughing.

• 2:43:14Speaker 05

  He would push me into going into weird places and kind of getting out of my comfort zone and and just, just taking every day as if it's the last one.

• 2:43:25Speaker 05

  We went on some weird adventures, including one that included a donkey show, which we won't get into, but. And we would always get shitfaced drunk every time we would come back from something.

• 2:43:39Speaker 05

  There was a, there's a word that I discovered or learned about up here in the US called PTSD.

• 2:43:48Speaker 05

  It's not a word that we know down there in Mexico. There's no, there's no concept of a veteran or, or a support network for people that go through the experiences that I went through. A lot of the people that go through those experiences down there, so there's no talk about that. There's a, there's a sense of machismo. You just take it, you know, it's fine. You know, just don't go crazy. So you'd get a few days off, you know, you get, you get to leave and you would go get drunk and come back and you would get asked if you were okay and you would lie your ass off and say yes and just go through with it. Go through the motions.

• 2:44:29Speaker 05

  Harmia was, he went through a lot. He went through most of it with me and every now and then he would go out and the reason why we got along, we were completely different people, separated from, by almost a decade in age. He had a weird fetish for 80s rancetto music and he wore boots and, you know, weird. He would have worn the pearly shirts and stuff like that and he was into that whole weird cowboy kind of culture and I was not, grew up as a skater kid, like punk rock and completely opposite. But what we shared is that we didn't take ourselves too seriously. We'd make the fun of ourselves and everything around us and every time we'd, we'd go out and, you know, partake in some festivities and get drunk.

• 2:45:15Speaker 05

  We would get, I mean, we would try and get comatose. That's what we would aim after.

• 2:45:24Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:45:24Speaker 05

  I don't know, I don't know if there's a, there's a X rating on this, but share a small story about him. It's a funny one.

• 2:45:31Shawn Ryan?

  Let's do it.

• 2:45:34Speaker 05

  One of the times we went through a bad situation once and we were celebrating that we were still alive. And we got leave and we got money and we said, you know what? Let's just go out and just get blacked out.

• 2:45:51Speaker 05

  Went out then got blacked out drunk, not blacked out, we conscientiously went back home after the whole night. Alone, we were, we were hunting for some sort of female comfort, but we were too much for them, you know? We went back to the house we were renting. At this house where a lot of us would live, kind of a safe house setting for us. Walked to the door and couldn't open the door.

• 2:46:17Speaker 05

  We wanted to pee, Harmio was like, I gotta pee, I gotta pee. We'll pee over there and I'll pee over here. So I'm standing there really drunk with my handgun, my Glock with a light on it, pointing towards the ground, being, I went out drinking with my gun, by the way, this is Mexico, different country, different mindset.

• 2:46:38Speaker 05

  And I hear Harmio say, oh no, oh, oh. What's wrong Harmio? Oh, something's wrong, oh, something's wrong. I turn around and point my light at him, you know? Oh shit. Again, different times.

• 2:46:53Speaker 05

  And he pissed his pants.

• 2:46:57Speaker 05

  And I was like, what? What's, what? What's up Harmio? There's something wrong. Yeah, you peed your pants, no, no, no, there's something wrong. I think my dick is blocked and I have a hole in one of my balls. What? That's exactly what I answered. I think my dick is blocked. And I have a hole in one of my balls, I didn't underst- Harmio, you're not making any sense. So, took the light off my gun, a little closer. He pulled one of his balls out to pee.

• 2:47:35Speaker 05

  Holy shit. He pulled one of his balls, he was so drunk that he pulled one of his balls out. That's amazing. And he was worried that his dick was blocked and he had a hole in one of his balls. First off, I had to explain biology to him and anatomy and physiology and it was, I laugh, I've never laughed more in my life. How long did it take you to figure that one out? That was, it was, it was a process. It was a pro.

• 2:48:00Shawn Ryan?

  Let's retrace the steps here.

• 2:48:04Speaker 05

  He pulled, he pulled one of his balls out. Anyway, so I laughed, we, I mean, I laughed and he started laughing as well. And it was a solid hour of us laughing out there in the misty morning hours.

• 2:48:23Speaker 05

  Kind of soaring up with that laughter. And we saw some horrible stuff the night before and I was medicinal.

• 2:48:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:34Speaker 05

  That was a moment. I was, I was remember that moment because it was.

• 2:48:40Speaker 05

  It was a form of escapism. We would just get numb.

• 2:48:50Speaker 05

  He was, he was, he was, he was one of those characters that, you know, the stories, just legendary stories about him.

• 2:48:58Speaker 05

  He kind of taught me a little bit of that laughter part, not humor, just not taking myself too seriously.

• 2:49:06Speaker 05

  I think probably the, the, kind of the most scary time or the most dangerous time for people that go through those types of experiences is the end.

• 2:49:19Speaker 05

  The, the bus stopping and letting you out.

• 2:49:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:23Speaker 05

  While the party is still going on on the bus.

• 2:49:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:26Speaker 05

  And you get left on the sidewalk as the bus moves away is the way I like to think about it. You know, the people that you lived, breathed, ate with, suffered with, bled with are still on the bus.

• 2:49:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:39Speaker 05

  And you have to get out of the bus.

• 2:49:44Speaker 05

  When everything stopped, when I had to leave the job and all of a sudden being involved, being in the know. Being responsible for all these people, them being responsible for me.

• 2:50:02Speaker 05

  Having homicide as a, as part of your job description, guns and grenades, smoke grenades there and just living this life was kind of surreal. But it was the normal. That was my normal for, for years.

• 2:50:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:17Speaker 05

  All of a sudden, you know, last call.

• 2:50:22Speaker 05

  Everybody out. Um, some people stayed on. And uh, you're not a part of it anymore. And everything stops and gets quiet.

• 2:50:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:34Speaker 05

  That's probably the most dangerous and closest I've been to ending, I think.

• 2:50:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:41Speaker 05

  I think that that's that's what a lot of people don't come back from or can't escape from when they when everything stops. That's the I don't know, it's like uh, when you're too busy to notice that you got cut or when you're when you're, you know, doing some sort of, you know, maybe you're training jiu jitsu and you got something really extended somewhere it shouldn't have been, but you're warm, so you don't feel it. Until you stop and then you start realizing how screwed you are physically.

• 2:51:10Shawn Ryan?

  And mentally.

• 2:51:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:51:12Shawn Ryan?

  And mentally.

• 2:51:14Speaker 05

  You start uh, you start counting your wounds, you start uh, realizing how um, all of a sudden, the family you had around you and all of you shared the same injuries, maybe all of you saying this the same outlook in life or the same normalcy. All of a sudden, you're taken out from that. Now you have to relate to people that have never been through that, never uh, gone through anything similar to that. And you realize how abnormal you are.

• 2:51:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:42Speaker 05

  And how out of place you are in a simple setting as going to a restaurant with your family and trying to figure out what the best place to be is um, you know, trying to figure out who there is armed or

• 2:51:58Speaker 05

  being distracted, not being in the moment. And then basically that being a sacrifice and that being detrimental to your family health.

• 2:52:10Speaker 05

  And all that comes with it, um, sleep disorder.

• 2:52:15Speaker 05

  Substance abuse. You know, alcohol.

• 2:52:20Speaker 05

  Drugs for some people. Um, not being able to find.

• 2:52:27Speaker 05

  Not being able to find the right words to explain to somebody. Like what, there's no words to explain it to somebody. You know, I think Alan Watts talks about poetry. That's, that's what poetry is. Putting into words what is unexplainable.

• 2:52:46Speaker 05

  I do, I do writing, a lot of writing, and I try and put into words what I can't explain. And, uh, like, I couldn't find people that I could, you know, explain some of this stuff to until I found, you know, a veteran community in, in California. When I moved up there and started doing classes and meeting people that had service experience. And I started kind of figuring out that I had, there was a name for what I had. That other people were struggling with going to the store and going into an anxiety or panic attack at, at, uh,

• 2:53:29Speaker 05

  at a, uh, at a restaurant because somebody was doing something that

• 2:53:38Speaker 05

  manifested a, a moment or an event in the past.

• 2:53:46Speaker 05

  I mean, I don't know, I don't know how, how it's been for you, but, uh, when, when some of these things come back into your headspace, it's almost like there's no time.

• 2:53:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:59Speaker 05

  You're there, you're here, you're, you're both at the, like, everything's happening at the same time. And people around you don't realize this. You know, something horrible you saw, something horrible that happened. And something you see and in the environment triggers it and you're back to, you're back there and you're here. And you express it through an anxiety attack of an outburst of some sort. Apathy in the relationship you might be having at the moment with somebody.

• 2:54:32Speaker 05

  Or you just shut off and you go sleep in a closet for a few weeks. Because that's your safe place.

• 2:54:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:41Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 2:54:42Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, yeah, no, I mean, you just kind of asked like, if I went through it, fuck yeah, you know, I went through it.

• 2:54:50Shawn Ryan?

  And I went through, I went to therapy for twice a day, almost for three, three years. Or not twice a day, twice a week for three years. And, and, you know, I still fucking struggle with it. It gets better, but you know.

• 2:55:05Shawn Ryan?

  It's, you gotta be willing to invest your time into it and want to, and want to fucking pull yourself out, you know. I had a wake up call and I tried to, I tried to kill myself from my car in my fucking garage. And I don't even remember it, but to be honest with you, my whole fucking house should have.

• 2:55:32Shawn Ryan?

  Gone up in flames, but for some fucking reason it didn't.

• 2:55:37Speaker 05

  Now, I'll ask this question. It's something I hear a lot. That's not the easy way out. For somebody like you, for somebody like me that. Tried to be alive and stay alive for that long. That's not an easy exit.

• 2:55:54Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:55:55Speaker 05

  I get this easy out. Mentality from some people. They don't understand what that is. That's actually.

• 2:56:03Speaker 05

  Going against everything in your being in nature.

• 2:56:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:07Speaker 05

  To leave.

• 2:56:11Speaker 05

  I've contemplated and thought about and maybe approached that a few times myself.

• 2:56:19Speaker 05

  My whole thing is that is completely counter to the nature of what I am and what I became during that whole time, where I was trying to figure out ways of surviving. And every time I hear somebody say that, they took the easy way out. That's, I don't think that's true for most people that went through some of that stuff.

• 2:56:43Speaker 05

  Also, the honesty and being open to talk about this. Where I'm from, you talk about what I'm talking about right here. This is the end of your career.

• 2:56:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:53Speaker 05

  You are local, crazy. You are non-functional. You're not to be trusted.

• 2:57:03Speaker 05

  I, I, I write, I write some of these flashbacks down at times. I share them openly.

• 2:57:11Speaker 05

  It's a very personal thing to share some of that stuff openly.

• 2:57:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:15Speaker 05

  Not easy again, not easy. It helps if you talk about it. It's like I heard from a therapist. It does, but it hurts a lot. It's like peeling off a scab.

• 2:57:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:26Speaker 05

  And showing somebody, this is what was under that scab. So you can see it. Here you go. Now, forget about the scab. You know, forget about the wound that you just saw. Treat me like a normal person. It doesn't work that way.

• 2:57:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:39Speaker 05

  There's a stigma to it. And I think the stigma up here in the U.S. is, I mean, there's more conscientious, there's a bit more conscience about it. There's a bit more of a community and support, support around it. And it's not, that's not, that's not something I had when I was going, going through that down there.

• 2:57:54Shawn Ryan?

  There is now, but there, there, it hasn't been around, around for very fucking long. You know, when I, when I left the, when I left the SEAL teams, there was none of that shit. And it was exactly what you were saying.

• 2:58:06Speaker 05

  Was it, was there a culture of? Suck it up?

• 2:58:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, fuck, yeah, there was. There probably still is. I know it's better now, but...

• 2:58:16Speaker 05

  And again, I think when you go back and kind of learn, I'm into history and I like reading about other warrior cultures and people that did, you know, things that they had to do. You know, PTSD has always been with us. It's been, this is, this, this, what you, we talked about, your experience, what I'm talking about. We're not talking about anything new. This is the history of the world. But I think there's something that happened culturally that separated us from how people used to handle some of these things, or how some people would talk about some of these things.

• 2:58:54Speaker 05

  From a spirit quest, as they used to kill them, or finding yourself, or going off on these pilgrimages, or whatever form they took, ceremony.

• 2:59:08Speaker 05

  You know, ceremony is simply performing an act with a symbology just to convince your subconscious mind of something. So from going to mass and eating a cracker that's supposed to be the body of Jesus, and drinking wine that's supposed to be the blood of Jesus, there's a symbology there.

• 2:59:28Speaker 05

  To getting, to get it, to getting handed a silver coin at the start of a leadership position, and getting told that you were gonna get another one, because you go into it knowing it's gonna end.

• 2:59:42Speaker 05

  I think some of those things are missing, and some of our kind of modern way of approaching some of these things, some of these things have been amputated from us. We're suffering from a phantom limb syndrome when it comes to some of these things, you know, what happens after. Like, I grew up having parties at the cemetery during days of the dead. And every day, I get a weird feeling every time I travel up here and I see empty cemeteries with no people there. It's like a, they're forgotten.

• 3:00:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:12Speaker 05

  Space. There's no relationship there. I don't know.

• 3:00:18Speaker 05

  I think that that whole culture of suck it up, be a man, go through it, I get that.

• 3:00:30Shawn Ryan?

  It worked. It fucking worked, you know, it works when you're in, it works when you're in it, you know? And it makes you effective.

• 3:00:39Speaker 05

  But when you're off the bus.

• 3:00:40Shawn Ryan?

  When you're out, you're fucked.

• 3:00:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:00:43Shawn Ryan?

  And uh.

• 3:00:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, my mom used to say that a toll, I'll quote that, I'll get that quote again. Um, I went through a horrible, a few bad situations, but I think one of the first ones, uh, um, the war that I fought was at home with an enemy that spoke the same language that I did. Every now and then we would share funerary homes with the enemy. The counter guys were burying, burying, being mourned over on that side of the street and we're having our services for our guys who are here. So it was different in that way. Um,

• 3:01:27Speaker 05

  they had a very horrible thing happen. Um, very traumatic. I lost a few people. And um, I was covered in blood, my clothing was covered in blood. My sneakers, my socks, feel in my toes. And blood has a tendency to kind of dry out and crust a little bit. Um, I remember I wrote the reports that I had to write and talk to the people that I had to talk and I was let, you know, told to, to go to the hotel and wash up and come back the second day. I got in the car and drove straight home.

• 3:02:05Speaker 05

  Like unconsciously, just drove to my parents' house. I drove probably three hours in the night, straight there.

• 3:02:14Speaker 05

  I showed up some, sometime in the early mornings and my mom opened the door. She saw.

• 3:02:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:02:25Speaker 05

  Um, she didn't say anything. She sat me down, took my clothing off.

• 3:02:31Speaker 05

  Put in the washer. And made me, made me some coffee. She didn't ask anything.

• 3:02:41Speaker 05

  The next morning, I passed out for a bit.

• 3:02:46Speaker 05

  And she asked me, like, what do you want to do?

• 3:02:49Speaker 05

  So I want to go home.

• 3:02:52Speaker 05

  She said, there's, there's no such thing as going back home, Ed.

• 3:02:57Speaker 05

  Uh, either you change on your way back to home.

• 3:03:02Speaker 05

  Or the home you left changes when you're, you're gone and you don't recognize it when you come back.

• 3:03:09Speaker 05

  So she told me, uh, going back home is, that train's left the station. There's no going back home. So you have to figure out what that looks like for you next.

• 3:03:24Speaker 05

  I was very

• 3:03:26Speaker 05

  mind altering.

• 3:03:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:29Speaker 05

  She was, she, she lived through a lot herself, so.

• 3:03:33Speaker 05

  She was very wise.

• 3:03:34Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds like it.

• 3:03:35Speaker 05

  Um, she, uh,

• 3:03:40Speaker 05

  she, in her, in her own way, she told me to suck it up. Um, I stood, I stood up and, uh, I remember smelling my clothes, they were like downy fresh, you know? Uh, she bagged me a lunch, got in the car.

• 3:03:57Speaker 05

  I saw the missing, missed phone calls on my cell phone.

• 3:04:01Speaker 05

  People were angry. I went back and faced the music. Told them, where'd you go? So I just needed, I just needed a moment.

• 3:04:10Speaker 05

  I got reprimanded for leaving.

• 3:04:12Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 3:04:14Speaker 05

  But, you know, it, it was, uh, I realized that,

• 3:04:21Speaker 05

  there was no going back home. So that gave me focus on going straight. Uh, surviving, figuring out what that, uh, what that road would lead me. I was aimless.

• 3:04:34Shawn Ryan?

  It fucking changes you.

• 3:04:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:04:36Shawn Ryan?

  How long did it take for you to realize your mom was fucking right on the money?

• 3:04:42Speaker 05

  I'd say, um,

• 3:04:47Speaker 05

  Probably, probably a few, a few, a few days after she passed away.

• 3:04:52Speaker 05

  She, she, uh.

• 3:04:56Speaker 05

  She, she struggled for a long time with a, with a few issues.

• 3:05:02Speaker 05

  And, uh, before she went, she told me to leave that job.

• 3:05:07Speaker 05

  Leave that thankless job and. That's not, that's no longer the war you should fight. That's not your war anymore. Uh, she passed away and, uh. I did a lot of self-reflection. Again, I got two days off to mourn my mom.

• 3:05:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:26Speaker 05

  She got to meet my kid, which I think was, that was very soothing to my. Uh, mourning process and, uh.

• 3:05:37Speaker 05

  Uh, got everything kind of aligned after that. She passed away and, you know, there are a few things kind of shifted polit- politically down there and I had to leave.

• 3:05:46Speaker 05

  That kind of, she gave me that push at the end, I think. I remember thinking back to that moment and that kind of, I wrote it down. I've, I've shared that on. I've shared that openly a few times. It went down.

• 3:06:01Speaker 05

  I remember, and every time I smell that morning coffee, I remember that moment. Kind of brings me back to that.

• 3:06:08Speaker 05

  We're a moment where there's no more innocence. You know? You're facing your mom and you're not.

• 3:06:15Speaker 05

  You're not what you were.

• 3:06:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I know that feeling. Sorry to hear that, but, uh, you know. Sounds like she was looking out for him, man.

• 3:06:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:06:28Shawn Ryan?

  You know, but, uh, and sounds like she still is. After she passed.

• 3:06:35Speaker 05

  Uh, she's, she's always here.

• 3:06:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:40Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, everything I do, she's, uh, she's always been like a big inspiration. It's one of those teachers that you don't recognize as a teacher until they're not there anymore.

• 3:06:51Speaker 05

  Uh, one of the things she used to do and push me to was volunteer work and um till we would go and feed some of the uh some of the people at the Tijuana Canal and heroin addicts. Uh, she gave me

• 3:07:09Speaker 05

  she gave me the eyes to see humanity, even even at the lowest levels. Um, I remember she had one of the first self-defense classes I gave was through a church group that would work with some of the prostitutes in Tijuana. And that was my mom pushing me to do that. Uh, you know, all this cool shit, you think you're think you're some expert and stuff like that. Go teach them, they need it.

• 3:07:36Speaker 05

  She gave me eyes. Um, instead of dehumanizing people, I think that's one of probably one of the biggest things she gave me was the human factor. So I can

• 3:07:47Speaker 05

  I can relate to people and talk to people uh despite that they were trying to kill me only a few moments later.

• 3:07:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:55Speaker 05

  I could sit them down, give them a phone, have them phone, maybe a family member to tell them that okay. Kill them a cigarette. Uh, give them a swig of tequila and talk to people. Um, that's a that's a powerful armor that she gave me with that. And it's something that I've been using to try and process that whole that whole life that I left behind. Again, the world has ended for me a few times over.

• 3:08:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:23Speaker 05

  So, um

• 3:08:26Speaker 05

  part of my process to kind of there is no getting better, there is no healing, there's there's learning how to live with things. Uh, there's learning how to how to find a new normal. Um, how to find a new center or a new base. That's what I think I'm kind of looking towards. And I've been basically on the road for the past three years trying to find that for myself. I've not found it yet.

• 3:08:53Shawn Ryan?

  You're in it, man.

• 3:08:54Speaker 05

  What?

• 3:08:54Shawn Ryan?

  You're fucking in it right now.

• 3:08:56Speaker 05

  Well, this is a, this is a, this is a, we all have these moments, right? Where we're trying to figure out where we are in the world, what we're supposed to do. I've been pretty aimless for the past probably two, three years, where I'm trying to figure out where I am. I travel a lot, every, every couple of weeks, I'm in a different state, you know? Whole waking up in a hotel room, figuring out where you are, when you are.

• 3:09:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:26Speaker 05

  That, that when you are part, that's pretty interesting. Sometimes I dream, vivid dreams about being back somewhere, sleeping in a hole or something.

• 3:09:38Speaker 05

  Waking up covered in cockroaches or ants, because I'm sleeping in a weird field somewhere.

• 3:09:46Speaker 05

  Reaching for a rifle that is no longer there.

• 3:09:51Speaker 05

  Hearing karma, hara meya, telling me that it's almost time to wake up.

• 3:09:57Speaker 05

  Hearing the radio, sat radio beeping, as it's charging in the background. Like tattoos in your mind. You wake up and you're brought back into here. And, uh, I was driving here, seeing all the green scenery.

• 3:10:16Speaker 05

  I was seeing that all the life around, the trees make noise. Everything's green, everything's good, everything's alive, you know? And, uh, you just take this moment, you're like, what, where, how did I get here? Right?

• 3:10:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:32Speaker 05

  And why? Right?

• 3:10:36Speaker 05

  I think part of the answer to the why is sharing some, some of my experiences with people and having it resonate with some.

• 3:10:45Speaker 05

  I write these small stories I call fever dreams, because that's what they are, like weird flashbacks into a past that I sometimes I kind of question, you know, it's like, was I really, was I really there? And I write them down and all of them are basically just an honest expression of something that happened. And I've gotten a lot of people sending messages that they thought they were the only ones. They thought that nobody felt like that. They, I gave them the words to describe

• 3:11:23Speaker 05

  something that they couldn't. That never being able to go back home quote, I remember sharing it and a lot of people kind of responded to it and resonated with a lot of people. I think probably that's probably half of the reason why I'm still here, I think. There's a story within me that I need to kind of share with people openly. And it's been, I'm very selfish as well because that helps me out with my process, kind of putting some of these things out.

• 3:11:55Shawn Ryan?

  Well, just you saying that right there is gonna fucking help thousands of people, you know, and it's, it's, you know, the similar, the, everything you're describing is like very similar to what I've gone through and what a lot of guys have gone through and it's that I've worked with or are colleagues, you know, and it's, I mean, you're, you're the first person I've had on the show that is, you know, that's an immigrant that fought

• 3:12:33Shawn Ryan?

  a different, fought in a completely different fucking war and saw a lot of, we, we, we've seen a lot of some similar things, you know, and, and the, it's similar, it's extremely similar and, you know, it takes a lot of fucking time.

• 3:12:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:12:55Shawn Ryan?

  You know, it took me a lot of time, but I mean, fuck, man, it just.

• 3:13:01Speaker 05

  The guilt.

• 3:13:01Shawn Ryan?

  Don't stop working at it.

• 3:13:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, another thing, the guilt. You're here, a lot of people aren't. You get that every now and then?

• 3:13:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:14Speaker 05

  Like there's people that are very deserving, people that are not assholes. People that took care of their bodies, that ate healthy. They're not here anymore. They were with me at some point. They got eaten up by it. And I'm here and I don't take care of myself.

• 3:13:32Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 3:13:33Speaker 05

  I'm a, I'm a self-flagellate with a, with this guilt whip. Sleepless nights and don't take care of myself at times. I know that's like a common thing I've seen as well with some people. But wanting to, to keep them alive somehow. Maybe by stories, maybe by naming something after them or. I know that's, it's a, that's another weird part of it. That guilt you feel every day. You could be, you'd be a green field petting an alpaca

• 3:14:15Speaker 05

  in the middle of this green heavenly field. And thinking about somebody that you might have lost along the way that might have enjoyed that. And you feel guilty about it, you know? I don't know, we, we all process some of these things in a different way, but there's a commonality with how I've seen a lot of people that kind of went through the same things that I did. And how they process it. You know what, I was, I was, I was, I always dig finding those similarities. It helps me not feel alone, again selfish. I know. And I was gonna catch myself when I start feeling that way, but. That's, it's, it's, it's a.

• 3:14:57Speaker 05

  I was talking about being around people that, that know, they know the words to that song, you know? And there's a song, it's a song that's old as time. I remember sharing this video of this marine.

• 3:15:14Speaker 05

  Dressed in his dress blues. I think he was a Native American. I don't remember the name of his nation. He was dancing with a war drum. He was dancing with a spear in one hand and a and a shield in the other. And a lot of people were expressing how beautiful that was. But I didn't know why.

• 3:15:43Speaker 05

  He's singing this, he's singing the war songs of this, of his people. He remembers them. He remembers their weapons. He remembers their ancestors. He remembers their names of their ancestors. He is everything that they survived into the point where he's dancing there in front of them. And, but he's dancing in the uniform of the nation that conquered his nation. Yeah, but he's alive. And he remembers his songs that went before. He remembers the weapons of their people. He remembers the culture, the warrior culture. Like, he has an attachment to that. Can you remember the songs of your ancestors? Can you remember the ways that their spears were made?

• 3:16:27Speaker 05

  A lot of us suffer from that amputation, that cultural amputation. We don't remember the songs. And I think the one thing I always, I've always kind of realized recently is that if you don't remember the songs, you make up new ones. And if you see the new guy coming in, you teach him those songs so he can get a semblance of that. Remembering the ones that went before. That's the way you keep them alive. And that's the way you keep the new guys alive. So, this helps. We don't have drums and we don't have fireplaces, but we do have YouTube.

• 3:17:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:02Speaker 05

  Right? So, in that regard, I, I really appreciate you doing these.

• 3:17:08Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 3:17:09Speaker 05

  This is the drum that a lot of people are gonna hear after, after we're gone.

• 3:17:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 3:17:15Speaker 05

  There's a, there's a certain power in keeping some of these conversations alive. I wish I had some of these conversations at the back of my head when I started. And we didn't. Right? That's a, I think that's a, there's a power in that.

• 3:17:33Shawn Ryan?

  I talk to them, you know? I talk to my boys that aren't here anymore and

• 3:17:41Shawn Ryan?

  And the guilt, you know, I um.

• 3:17:45Shawn Ryan?

  I try to think about if the roles were reversed and I was them and they were alive. Would I want them feeling like that, you know, or what I want them to fucking enjoy like? What I want them to enjoy their life? And you know, even just the fact, you know, and because that's what we're supposed to fucking do. You know, you were just talking about driving here and seeing all the green and the creeks and the animals and all that kind of stuff and. Uh, you know, that's what ninety nine percent of the people in this country see every fucking day. You know what I mean?

• 3:18:20Speaker 05

  Heaven.

• 3:18:21Shawn Ryan?

  Is, yeah, they're happy people and and uh. And um, you know, with the career paths like with what we chose.

• 3:18:32Shawn Ryan?

  We don't experience that and it takes a long time to to get to a point where you.

• 3:18:40Shawn Ryan?

  Where it's okay.

• 3:18:41Speaker 05

  We can allow yourself to enjoy.

• 3:18:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 3:18:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, um. Yeah, the people that leave get brighter and younger in our minds. Ever notice that as well?

• 3:18:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:53Speaker 05

  Um, I remember some of the people that I lost were older than I was. And somewhere along the lines of my mind's line passed them along the way. And they get younger and brighter. Um, now I I hear I I hear him sometimes, specifically Carmine. It's like a weird voice in the back of my head.

• 3:19:13Speaker 05

  He's always advising me to do the wrong things. To take one more beer. To enjoy one more song. Tasked a girl in ants. He's a sadist, you know, he wants that. He wants that. He wants me to hate on us. He wants me to partake in all that. And I think that's probably part of my subconscious that just is telling me to enjoy your life. You're allowed to enjoy.

• 3:19:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:40Speaker 05

  I don't know, maybe it's a Catholic guilt in me. Built into me when I was a kid, but you know, um. There's something about enjoying those moments that you some of us, you know, struggle with that.

• 3:19:52Speaker 05

  Every now and then I catch myself in this perfect moment. Um. My kid. Uh, running around finding Easter eggs.

• 3:20:03Speaker 05

  I'm laughing.

• 3:20:07Speaker 05

  This moment of perfect laughter.

• 3:20:14Speaker 05

  Ed, why'd you, you know?

• 3:20:18Speaker 05

  There's a weird pain and happiness in that.

• 3:20:25Speaker 05

  Not a lot of people can understand.

• 3:20:28Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I'm glad you're feeling it, man.

• 3:20:32Shawn Ryan?

  I really am.

• 3:20:38Shawn Ryan?

  I got one of those voices too. He's right fucking behind you.

• 3:20:43Shawn Ryan?

  That flag up there. But, um.

• 3:20:48Shawn Ryan?

  You talk about shamanism.

• 3:20:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:20:50Shawn Ryan?

  A little bit.

• 3:20:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:20:52Shawn Ryan?

  Have you done any, have you, uh?

• 3:20:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, it's Mexico. We're, we're all about it. We have a contact, uh, I come from a culture where we party at the graves. During Day of the Dead, we sleep over on gravesites.

• 3:21:08Speaker 05

  We have altars to our dead. Necromancy is part of our culture. Which is, you know, weird. I heard from somebody up here in Tennessee once. He asked me if I was a Christian. I told him, yeah, I'm Catholic. Oh, so you're not, you know?

• 3:21:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, very much a paganistic, a paganistic culture. Shamanism is a big part of it.

• 3:21:37Speaker 05

  There's a, there's things called beladas. Beladas are basically like, uh, they were made famous by a lady. Uh, Sabina, Maria Sabina. Like the Beatles would go down to Mexico when they were a lot, when they were like a thing. And they would take these mushroom, um, trips.

• 3:21:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:58Speaker 05

  Midnight mushroom trips. Uh, psilocybin at the core of most of that.

• 3:22:05Shawn Ryan?

  I've heard a lot of good things about psilocybin and PTSD.

• 3:22:12Speaker 05

  I mean, I've tried, I've tried the pharmaceutical side of it. And. It it uh it takes certain things from you. When you try and you know, get back to normalcy. So I know, I mean, I'm sure some people have experienced taking some of those uh most uh pharmaceutical medications and feel like a zombie. Or feel like you're like on autopilot or.

• 3:22:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it's not you.

• 3:22:41Speaker 05

  Like in the backseat of a car driving from the backseat and I don't know, I don't know.

• 3:22:48Speaker 05

  Some of them have helped, uh, not all of them. I had a few people recommend psilocybin. Basically mushrooms are microdosing and macrodosing.

• 3:23:02Speaker 05

  But actually having a process before it's not, it's not just taking them.

• 3:23:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:07Speaker 05

  Shamanism in different places, I mean, you know, they have the psilocybin and hallucinogenics have have a long history in warrior culture. Like even, well, if you want to talk about Aztecs, Aztec, some of the Aztec elite warrior castes would would go on hallucinogenic trips before they would go out and do whatever they did. And when they would come back, they would do the same.

• 3:23:34Speaker 05

  So I remember when I, when I was younger, when I was younger. And went through a bunch of bad horrible stuff. And one of my my vacation times, I took a trip down to southern Mexico and went on one of these veladas. Like a, so it was spiritual. Shaman woman guides you into a velada. It's like a twelve, twelve at night, midnight uh trip with mushrooms. But one of the things she was very clear about was our intention at the start.

• 3:24:08Speaker 05

  Are you here to have fun? Are you here to feel funny? Are you here to work out something? Like, what are you here for? And then she would have us write down our intention on a, on a page. And then after that, we would have to physically write that down with our feet in the form of a pattern on the ground. And a lot of us were exhausted because we had to travel on foot on top of this hill. There was always some, some weird symbology throughout the whole experience.

• 3:24:41Speaker 05

  I think the, what it takes you towards is a comic, like a clear, honest conversation with yourself. You know? Are you by yourself? Yeah, you're with people, but when that hits, you're not with people. I haven't done it. It's, again, it's one of those things where I don't recommend everybody, I think not everybody is meant to do it. If you have some sort of issues, it might, it might wake, awaken some things that might be harmful for people. I don't think people should do it recreationally. I think there should be some sort of people that guide you through the process. That's what I've had, and I think it's, it's helped me out tremendously in,

• 3:25:22Speaker 05

  in figuring, figuring and processing some of these things. I don't know, like, I mean, the best way I can explain it is,

• 3:25:36Speaker 05

  when you, it's like a mental fog or, or like a mental cobwebs you might have. And psilocybin kind of takes some of that away from that, that process between having something, something or an event that affected you in a very deep way, and just having that event in your head, doing circles and actually inserting yourself in that event, and trying to figure it out by reconstructing it. Let's say, it's like, it's like making a play about something that you had to go through, and then as a director going in there and, you know, this could be over here, and I should, should have done this over here,

• 3:26:21Speaker 05

  but I can't change it, so this is the thing, so I just figured, I had to do all this to figure out that I'm in charge of my own well-being, and it's stupid to try and force something to change that can't change. Yeah. So some of those processes I kind of went through. Psilocybin is, I think it's a, there's a lot of potential there. I, I don't think it should be illegal. I think there's...

• 3:26:46Speaker 05

  You know, there's more horrible stuff out there.

• 3:26:48Shawn Ryan?

  The more I hear about it and the more I read about it, I mean.

• 3:26:52Speaker 05

  Flaming hot, flaming hot cheetos should be illegal, not suicide.

• 3:26:58Speaker 05

  I think they do more harm. It's not, it's not, again, I don't think it's a recreational thing.

• 3:27:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:05Speaker 05

  I think, I think our ancestors were on to something with that. I think it's probably as old, as old as we are as a species.

• 3:27:16Speaker 05

  It does help. It does help.

• 3:27:18Shawn Ryan?

  Would you recommend it?

• 3:27:20Speaker 05

  I would.

• 3:27:21Shawn Ryan?

  Absolutely.

• 3:27:22Speaker 05

  I would, again, not recreationally, and do it with people that know what they're doing and be very sure about your intentions when you go through it.

• 3:27:32Speaker 05

  I don't think.

• 3:27:36Speaker 05

  I don't think it's, I don't think it's, it's something meant to be done several times. I think it's something you meant, you're meant to be, you're meant to do a few times, maybe. And.

• 3:27:49Speaker 05

  A lot of us didn't do it at the start to figure ourselves out before we went through the fire.

• 3:27:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:54Speaker 05

  And, but, but I think if anything, we should do it at the end, after we come out of it.

• 3:28:02Speaker 05

  It helps you process. I think there's a medicine in that.

• 3:28:07Shawn Ryan?

  That's awesome, man.

• 3:28:10Shawn Ryan?

  I've been thinking a lot about it, but. Let's move on.

• 3:28:15Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 3:28:18Shawn Ryan?

  Covered a lot of material there and.

• 3:28:24Shawn Ryan?

  Lose me with one question and. How do we fucking stop the cartels? Is it even possible?

• 3:28:35Speaker 05

  I think there is a.

• 3:28:38Speaker 05

  I think it's not, it's, it's not a Mexican problem. It's a regional problem. So that's the first part of the solution. To recognize that we are not only neighbors intertwined by blood, commerce.

• 3:28:56Speaker 05

  Criminal organizations. We are a country that is very much linked. We're very much a symbiotic relationship going on. And it's a regional problem. So treating it as anything else than that is a problem. Also, I've paid taxes up here now, so I can say this. Every single person out there is an American that pays taxes is paying for the drug war in different ways. Even though you don't know it, a lot of your tax money is going down there and funding companies that make a living off that drug war, keeping its status as well.

• 3:29:38Speaker 05

  So as an example, when I was down there, all of my uniforms were bought that I would have to wear. They were all bought through a specific uniform tactical company that is American-based, which I won't name. But they make a killing off that drug war. All of the vehicles that we ride, you ever wonder why every police corporation down there rides around in a pickup truck? There's a deal, there's a vested interest in there. Americans need to demand that their representatives account for the money that's being sent

• 3:30:18Speaker 05

  down there, outsourcing that drug war and why things are getting worse instead of better, despite that the money and the budget is getting higher. That doesn't make sense.

• 3:30:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:32Speaker 05

  The way they're fighting the war is exactly the same way they've been fighting the war since I started.

• 3:30:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:39Speaker 05

  So there's something wrong with the whole process there. And it starts, it starts in the US as far as the fight goes. Legalize marijuana federally. Honestly, it's not gonna do, it's not gonna do any difference now. May have done a difference back, 20 years back, maybe 15 years back. But right now, I think we're at a point where cartels have moved on from that substance. So realistically, having that as a schedule on one substance federally, that won't make a difference if you legalize it or not. But I'd say legalize it.

• 3:31:21Speaker 05

  Go after not only the money that is related to that cartel by

• 3:31:28Speaker 05

  the money, the money that flows in and out of those organizations and there's ways of going after it. That's not my specialty, but I realize that if you give the, those groups a designation as terrorist, I think the US will have more tools to combat those organizations.

• 3:31:47Speaker 05

  And I think finally, there is no fighting the cartels without going into fighting a systemic corruption at high level politics in Mexico, at all levels. There is no such thing. You can't go down there and clean out the cartels and expect everything to go better. There is, there is a snake with, snake with two heads down there. On one end of the spectrum, there's the cartels and the other end of the spectrum is politics.

• 3:32:22Speaker 05

  These organizations can't subsist down there without sort of some, some sort of

• 3:32:29Speaker 05

  help from the other side of that snake. So, and it doesn't even matter if they're from the right or the left down there. They all, they all, they all respond to money. So any sort of help or any sort of nation building, as you guys, as America calls it, or any sort of

• 3:32:48Speaker 05

  offer to help Mexico is always going to be met with resistance because we don't want American interventionism in, in the country. And all that's going to be pushed forward and pressed forward by the political class down there because it's not in their best interest to get rid of the status quo. So again, the problem is systemic. I think there's no solution without solving the problem at both of those ends. I do believe that there's going to be a time and a, a, a time in the near future where the Americans, the American, America as a country is going to have its hands forced into a conflict within Mexico.

• 3:33:29Speaker 05

  There's going to be some sort of event related to natural resources, to foreign influence. I thought that event might have been the massacre in the desert in Sonora, the American children, women and children. But I don't think that's enough anymore. I think, and that's a sad thing to say, that's not enough.

• 3:33:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:51Speaker 05

  To force action. That's not enough to declare them a terrorist organization. You know, hey, yeah, they're not a terrorist organization. They don't have any clear political motives. Yes, they do. You want to talk about political killings? Mexico was the cap, world capital of political killings. Cartels assassinate political candidates. Cartels assassinate members of the press when they report things that they don't want to be reported. So they clearly have political motives. They clearly are interested in having certain people in certain places power down there. So it is very much an organization that, that has, that is politicized. They, they very much work within political structures to further their influence.

• 3:34:37Speaker 05

  And they hang people from bridges.

• 3:34:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:34:41Speaker 05

  They cut heads off. They burn people alive. They torture people and put them on videos that then get dispersed on the internet.

• 3:34:50Speaker 05

  All the ISIS torture videos and execution videos were inspired by cartel videos that came out before them.

• 3:34:58Speaker 05

  So even ISIS is taking pointers from these criminal groups.

• 3:35:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:03Speaker 05

  And for some reason, which is probably related to probably the influx of immigrants seeking asylum, now having the legitimate claim of fleeing from a terrorist organization into the US. Maybe that has something to do with the, the US's refusal to name them a terrorist organization. But I think they fit every single description of that, of an organization that is a terrorist organization and more. As far as, you know, Al Qaeda or ISIS, stuff like that, I don't see any of them operating in multimillion dollar businesses in the US.

• 3:35:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, even.

• 3:35:45Shawn Ryan?

  Even if everything, you know, controlling the money and all of that, I mean, the longer or the longer we take to do it, you know, China's right there. And it sounds like they've been there a lot longer than I thought after talking to you. But I don't know, you know, it's very, it's, it's very, even with our military, you know, and, and the technology that goes along with it, it's very, it is almost impossible to defeat an enemy that does not play by rules when you are forced to fucking play by rules.

• 3:36:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:36:26Shawn Ryan?

  And until, until the general populace decides that it's fucking bad enough that we don't need to play by those rules anymore, in my opinion, it's never gonna fucking go away. So you better get used to it.

• 3:36:45Speaker 05

  And I, I, I've, I've, I think the world has witnessed the, the power of the US military. And as somebody that's worked down there and have seen it up here and have friends and worked in that environment, I know the US can change that landscape really quickly if they wanted to, if they had the political backing, and if they had the ability to do so. It's not gonna be easy. This isn't an enemy that lives across the ocean.

• 3:37:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:15Speaker 05

  This is, this is not an enemy that lives across the ocean. I've, I've, I've heard conversations about what they would do if a full-scale invasion happened, or an armed intervention in Mexico would happen by US military forces, and what the cartel's response would be when they would, when they felt threatened. You'd hear, then again, this is by an organization that is not labeled a terrorist organization. Well, if the US decides to intervene, we'll just randomly poison drug loads going into the US and create a health crisis in this country that you have never seen in your history.

• 3:37:53Speaker 05

  Damn. Now imagine that reaction.

• 3:37:59Speaker 05

  This is an organization that can take pictures of people going in and out of Coronado. They have access to that, you know, that area. They can take notes and numbers. They can go on social media. They can discover where people live. They can make you want to go back home really quickly. Yeah. They can get to you. It's not, again, this is not an organization that, uh, that lives in a cave system somewhere in Afghanistan. These are guys that don't have their own cellphone networks. These are guys that have, operate multi-billion dollar, uh, business of, of drug trafficking. These are people that have tunnels underneath the border that could go put anything in there.

• 3:38:44Speaker 05

  And it's not uncommon to, uh, back in the post, uh, nine eleven era, to, that Americas would put Geiger counters in those drug tunnels because they were worried about what could get through. Now imagine somebody is, uh, like an organization that is not worried about that anymore. Yeah. All they're worried about is retribution.

• 3:39:04Speaker 05

  That would be, that would, that'd be a bad day, I think.

• 3:39:09Speaker 05

  It's not as easy as some people make it out to be. Oh, just send a group of, just send the military down there. It'll clean everything up. I think it's a, I think it's a, it's a problem that if we, if you leave long enough to fester, it's gonna... It's gonna snowball. Ah, fuck, it already has. And I think, uh, I think within our, within our lifetime, we'll see it. It's gonna be some event on the border. It's gonna be some sort of...

• 3:39:36Speaker 05

  I think it probably, the sad thing is, it's probably not gonna be even related to American blood spilled and/or drugs. That's probably gonna be a resource issue.

• 3:39:47Speaker 05

  But we'll see that intervention within our lifetimes, probably. I was saying five years. And I'm still at that five-year mark in my mind. I say five years because of the presidency going on down there and the incompetence. It's, uh, it's almost comical incompetence as far as how it's handling the drug, uh, the cartel issue and the violence issue. And how it's, each year it's just becoming worse and worse. So I don't know.

• 3:40:16Speaker 05

  I just know that there's no such thing as a Mexican solution or an American solution. It has to be a regional solution. And I'm not expecting the UN to step in at any time soon.

• 3:40:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, I think we're gonna wrap this thing up, but I just wanna say, man, I really appreciate you making the trip. And your story is fucking amazing, dude. So this is gonna help a lot of people, especially with that one segment. And, you know, I know it sounds like you're kinda still searching for a purpose, but I'm telling you, man, you're fucking killing it. And you probably are very similar to a lot of my friends. And you don't reflect on your own success. And, you know, but I'm just gonna tell you, you're fucking killing it, dude.

• 3:41:11Shawn Ryan?

  And you're doing a great job and you're spreading a fucking great message. And you're bringing to awareness to shit that people need to fucking hear about. So, you know, keep it up, keep it up.

• 3:41:26Speaker 05

  Thank you for the reminder. Sometimes I need a kick in the ass to keep going.

• 3:41:29Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man. Well, thanks for coming.

• 3:41:33Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 3:41:43Speaker 03

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