Camp Gagnon - Inside Mexico’s Most Violent Cartel Shootouts

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

Dave Franke joins us in the tent today to talk about his career fighting cartels and their gruesome crimes as an officer for the Secretaría de Seguridad Pública (Mexico's Secretariat of Security and Civilian Protection), which is responsible for public safety, police coordination, and internal security in Mexico...WELCOME TO CAMP 🏕️Shoutout to our sponsor: Relay and BlueChewJoin the Relay App community HERE: http://www.joinrelay.app/camp👕🧢 GET YOUR CAMP DRIP HERE: http://camp-rd.com🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets Here: https://markgagnonlive.com🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History Here: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.comTimestamps:0:00 Leaving America to Work In Mexico9:50 Fighting 3 Mexican Government Bodyguards14:55 Dave’s Early Life16:37 Mexican Basic Training22:19 Day One of Fighting Cartels25:36 The Objective of The Job26:25 Protecting The Dalai Lama28:55 Cartels Taking Over + Military Trained Cartel’s38:36 Mexican Police Turning Into Cartel’s42:56 2 Hour Shootout w/ Cartel Members52:26 Getting Shot While on Patrol57:47 Mexico’s Most Famous Gunfight + Police Dressing as Women to Escape1:04:24 Cartel’s Mass Graves1:06:40 How Cartel’s Make Money1:10:46 Dangers of Working in Mexican Government

You want my last name. You got my last name. I'm not hiding anything. And when you put on a uniform in Mexico, they can just take issue with you and decide that we're just going to go get that guy and that's it. That's the deal that we make. This is Dave Frank, and he made it his life mission to take on the cartels who sold him drugs as a kid. That mission took him to Mexico, where he became a bodyguard for a high-ranking Mexican general.

So in order to get the job, you had to fight three of his guys. Yeah, yeah. What does that look like? Tapping one out with the chokehold real quick. while I'm getting kicked by the other two and then putting another one in an arm bar and gonna snap it, he quit, and then I got up and popped the other one from one.

And that win earned him a uniform and a front row seat to the best and the worst that humanity has to offer. And he's actually lived to tell the tale. I mean, everything you need to know from what it's actually like to battle the cartels, the operations that they went on, if you were interested in how the cartel actually works,

and what it actually looks like to be on the front lines battling with Mexico's most dangerous men, this episode is for you. without further ado, sit back, relax, and welcome the camp. Dave Frank, how are you, sir? Good, Mark. Hey, it's an honor to have you in my house. Thank you for coming by.

Of course. Thank you so much for having me, man. No, for real. And you guys killed it last night on your show. It was, I'm just going to tell anyone that might be watching this. If you haven't seen this guy live, you need to because it's just, he just kills it. Thank you. You'll see what's up. I appreciate it, man. I appreciate it. So far, we've had a wonderful time here in Portland, Oregon. and you are definitely one of the highlights of our trip. You know, we came out here for shows, of course, but we...

Oh, man, I'm honored to have you guys here. Yeah, we got to loop this in, and you have a fascinating story. There's many different parts of your life, but the part that we're going to focus on today is specifically your time as a bodyguard for a Mexican general in Mexico, basically fighting cartels. Correct.

I mean, it is a wild tale. So I'm curious, can you just explain to me how just, you know, a white dude from L.A. ends up becoming a bodyguard for a Mexican general. Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to go into my early life or anything like that, but basically I was a manager for a third-tier supplier for Boeing in an aerospace factory. And they had sent, during the Obama administration, they had sent a bunch of works out to Mexico.

We were working on what was called a low-cost company, which was basically supplanting American workers with foreign workers to pay less than wages. and I don't want to name the company that I was working for to avoid any type of legal problems. But it was a $60 million factory, and the first team went down there and they failed, and I had told them originally that I'm not going to sell my guys his jobs out. And when the first team went down there and failed,

I had shot myself in the foot at that company because they don't like to be told no. Yeah, of course. And so I knew I wasn't going anywhere, and I didn't want to hang out at that company. So when they came back to me, that they would pay me a $5,000 a month bonus to go down there and get that factory online because it was a major deal.

It was a supplier to Boeing and Airbus. And basically the challenge was coming up with a way that you could get Spanish-speaking workers to produce parts with English work instructions and French work instructions, whether it's Boeing or airline. And I have a lot of expertise in that area, drafting technical documents and whatever. So I went down there. And I started training people at a factory in Sokatecas, Mexico. Oh, wow.

So you go from managing this plant. Right. But even managing a plant. You know, I know a lot of people that work in, you know, like corporate management. That's a far cry from defending a Mexican general. So when does the Mexican general come into play and why do you start doing that? Well, long story short, I was in Russia and I was living there for a little while. And I don't really want to know if we should get off on that tangent.

but I have a daughter, and she was born at the Soda Hospital, and it's Therlita MacRussia. Her name is Yucatrina. Her middle name is David Dovna. She's 100% my daughter. She's beautiful, and I love her. But my ex-wife came back, and I was practicing jujitsu and judo at Gokor Chivichian's team highest on in North Hollywood. I had wanted to become a professional UFC fighter earlier.

So I was training all the time, and when my ex-wife got back to the States, I had agreed, to let them go take my daughter to Russia for a visit. She came back to the United States without my daughter. Whoa. Yeah. And to this day, my daughter, all these many years later, and we're talking 18 years later, my daughter still lives in Russia. My ex still lives in the States, has the entire time.

So when she came back without my daughter, I offered her $10,000 cash to give my daughter back, and she didn't want to do it. So I agreed to take the job in Mexico, managing the factory. and it was just weird the way everything coalesced. I had also previously written the Pekhejari, which is the Prokadria Canadaaleale de la Republica. And what is that? That is the Attorney General.

It was the American equivalent would be the Department of Justice, the FBI, Homeland Security, this type of thing. And they hadn't written me back. I had wanted to go down there because I knew that I wasn't going to hang out at that factory for a long time after I told them no. Mm-hmm. And six months later, they had written me back and my ex had already come back without my daughter.

And I'm like sitting there hanging out trying to get my daughter back. And my ex is thinking she's just going to ring me for money. And ultimately she did. And I don't want to really turn this into that. But I agreed to go to Mexico because the Pejere had written me back and they told me, Signor Frank, in this moment, no place to work for word. It says literally word for word what they said in that email. And it meant at this moment, you can't work for us.

The answer is no. And I thought that's fantastic news because they didn't say no. They said, not right now. And so I thought if I go down there and work for this factory, I can go down there and do what I want. I'm not liking being married. It was a very frigid marriage. And I wish my ex, all the success in the world, she came from a very big. came from a very hard life.

I have no animosity towards her. My daughter, if she sees this and someday she might, I love her dearly. I always have. Katia, Yatibin-l-bloom. But I'd agree to go to Mexico and hang out and do the management position there, and they were paying me handsomely for it.

Which area of Mexico was this? This is in Sakatakas, Mexico. Sokotakas. It's central northern Mexico. If you say northern, Mexico is a very long country. It's longer than people know. It's about 1,200 miles long, I think. And Zacatecas, because of the funky angle border with Texas,

when you say it's like 700 miles south of the border, people really don't get where it's at. Because a lot of times people will describe Zacatecas as northern Mexico. It is northern Mexico, but it's just above the center. So if you threw a dart at the dartboard, it would be just outside of the bull's eye. ring. So that's where Zocatecas is. And it's in a very hotly

contested zone. So I wound up in Mexico managing this factory. And every day at 7 o'clock they would pick us up at the hotel and they would drive us out to the airport which is where our factory was. And I would work there every night at 5 o'clock I'd get off

and as soon as I'm off, I'm knocking on the Pecate or the Attorney General's door, which is right down the street from the airport. And they're like wondering what's this guy doing? I'm like, You sent me an email. You said I could work here. I want to work here.

One of the things I'd asked him for was just enough money to pay for some razors in an apartment and enough to eat. So I wasn't looking to make a lot of money. I was looking to confront people that were giving drugs to kids, which is something that happened to me when I was a child. So I decided to go down there and do something about it. So you're seeing crime while you're doing this management job. You're kind of seeing what's going on. it was wild because when you first go to Mexico you you go there as a tourist and I did too I mean I've gone to Mexico on an off since I was 16 years old but on the Baja California Peninsula and

Mexico's got all Mexico's probably got like five distinct regions in it it's got the peninsula region which is separate from the rest of Mexico it's got the border region which has a huge influx of American and Mexican influence and different people that can be or exchange rate than the rest of the country does, given its proximity to the border. You've got the southern Yucatan Peninsula, which is also tourism and whatnot. You have the Sinaloa Golden Triangle region, which we'll get into, which is where the Chinese started growing opium, going way back, and why the cartels are located along the border, and it's not because of the proximity of the United States.

It's because the Chinese that went there to work were growing opium for their own personal use and then after the and that was right at the turn of the 1800s and 1900s early 1900s the local Mexicans started seeing that the Americans were coming over to buy this stuff

for cheap and so they started taking over the market and when Vietnam happened the opium and heroin use just exploded Oh wow and also there's more to it the Nazis get in there too because the Nazis wanted Mexico's help to infiltrate the United States

Right. Yeah. So they're developing these drug routes and these tunnels and stuff like that to go into the United States. And so there's just so much stuff that when we say, hey, we're going to go down and start a drug war with Mexico. You've really got to dig into it to understand the history and how things evolved and what's going on. Yeah, there's a famous telegram that came in like the 1940s from the Third Reich into Mexico basically saying like, hey, do you want to start an offensive into the United States? And they were really working on it. It never came to fruition.

Yeah, but no, they've definitely wanted to go in there and start, like, developing tunnels and whatnot to bring agents and whatnot into Mexico. They didn't want anything to do with drugs. But ultimately, that wound up being taken over by the cartel, and they ran with the idea, obviously, to where you get, I think the last one that was big was a tunnel going right into a Kentucky fried chicken. Wow. Yeah, there's a tunnel that went into Kentucky fried chicken. There's a Texas sheriff or an Arizona sheriff, one of them, that found a tunnel. A drug tunnel, delivering drugs and humans into a KFC on the American side of the border. That is wild.

Yeah, you can check it. You can check it out. That is crazy. So you're knocking on the Attorney General's door. Yeah, and they're thinking up crazy. And they think you're crazy. But eventually, they give you a job. No, I go knocking on all these other doors.

And so I knock on this general's door. And I'm in my suit. And as I told you, I was training judo and jujitsu, which I continue to do this day. there's a pair of Collius cream of sticks right there. I love martial arts. Everyone, if you're watching this, get your children involved in martial arts, do something positive.

But I go in there in this general, and I'm in a suit and tie, and this general wants a demonstration of fighting three of his guys, man. And I didn't have to do it right then, but the preceding day, or the upcoming days, I had to fight three of his guys and win.

And you just told him, like, hey, I'm trained in judo. I will totally do this. I'm trained. Yeah, and you just offered him, like I'll be protection for you. I'll be private security. Right.

Well, no. I went to him. I told them I wanted a job because what it happened is I knew that I was on the way out with that company. Right. And I finished my contract down there. I got everything up and running. And the company's like, okay, you need to come back to the United States now. I'm like, no, I don't want to.

I'm going to stay here in Mexico. Right. Your family gets a little bit upended. Like, things are a little shaky with where you're at. I'm like, I'm not coming back. And I told them that previously. When they sent me down there, I'm like, I'm not coming back to this place. So in March,

March I'd come back to the United States. I flew back to L.A. I turned in my letter of resignation, and they're like, whoa, and I didn't even have the job working for my general yet. I just knew I was going to stay in Mexico, and I was going to make it work. And I went back in March. May 1st of 2012, I was in uniform, actually not even in uniform. At that point in time, they had me in a white shirt and blue jeans going through basic training. in Mexico, dude. So in order to get the job, you had to fight three of his guys. Yeah. What does that look like?

Okay, that looks like tapping one out with the chokehold real quick while I'm getting kicked by the other two and then putting another one in an arm bar and going to snap it. He quit and then I got up and fought the other one and won. And the reason why, and I'm going to say this,

Dog Brothers, and I'm going to say it because I was a member of the tribe for a long time. There's some stuff between me and the owner of it. Dog Brothers is a great organization. And what is that? That is full-contact collies cream where we fight each other with those sticks and then we break each other's bones like that.

Like you go at it with weapons and whatnot and you light each other up and it's full-contact martial arts with Filipino martial arts. It's pretty dope. Wow. So when you take these three guys on, is it in like an octagon or is it just out of the...

No, it's out on the... They call it Campo de Tito. It was out on the shooting range. And they filled it all in with dirt because we used to have a CQB section down there where we would go through and you would learn

how to do CQB combat ultimately later on they filled it in but it's right exactly adjacent to our shooting range there Wow so you take on these three guys and I win because I have nothing left man I can't lose and what I was going to say is like in the dog brothers I've had my butt

kicked plenty I've had my clock cleaned that bone's broken from it I've been lipping up I've gotten hit in the head whatever I don't have anything to run to, so I have to make this work. And they're like, and I didn't know when you're at work in Mexico, you don't know. There's a lot of really brave and valiant Mexican police and agents, and they really get sold short because people just view them as all corrupt and they're not.

There are a lot of, oh man, I want to cry, dude. There's a lot of people that really put everything on the line to try to make the world a better place. and they do it at the risk of themselves and their families and their children because you're just going to get you're going to hack you up and stuff like that. It's like for real man. There's like a, there was some lady that was

driving in a taxi with her kids and she was an accountant or whatever and they just took all three of them out of the car and just one o'clock in the afternoon just shot them right right in the middle of the street, you know? Yeah. And you know there's like all this stuff with going on politically in this country right now.

I'm not going to get into it because there's valid points on every side of that spectrum. And it's not just two sides. There's a lot of sides to it. And everyone's got a legitimate gripe, you know, people that want a better life, people like, hey, I got a right to my own country, my own government, et cetera. But when you watch this happen in Mexico, part of it just dehumanizes you because you're so used to, like, I can't count how many headless people I've seen. Like, they just leave heads in the coolers.

So I don't want to really get off topic. but I go there and I've got nothing I've got nothing to lose and so yeah I'm not going to lose this fight and I win it and so my generals I compressed and the thing that I had more than anything wasn't even my capabilities I'm great at shooting I grew up I knew how to shoot before I even knew how to read

I've got two dads I'm just going to get into a one of my fathers my biological fathers is a postop transsexual that was a tunnel rat in Vietnam so very hardcore very crazy came back to the United States, became very rich, very wealthy, had his own company,

but decided he was going to live life as a woman, and I really don't like saying that, but I grew up fighting my whole life because of this. I was known as, I'm not going to put my last name out there, but it sounds like a word having to do with being homosexual. So you got bullied a little bit. I got bullied all the time.

And I'm not going to say bully because we're going to go toe to toe. Yeah. So we're definitely fighting. but yeah, I did not get a moment. Yeah, I wouldn't want to bully you. I'll be honest. No, hey, you're bigger.

Hey, if you can't see, this guy's like tall, man. He's huge. No, no, no. Yeah, he is. But I haven't broken my knuckles four times. Nah, man. So I got bullied a lot growing up, and so we used to fight, and then they gave me away the dad was born.

So I got, I grew up, I didn't have a name for two years. My biological dad was a Marine. And so when I got back to my mom, my mom smoked pot with Charles Manson. We'll get into all of that. my mom finally gets me back from this illegal adoption and his father raises me and he raises me on a corn and pig farm in Iowa. I was born in L.A. before they got divorced and we learned how to shoot. So I grew up my whole life shooting. So when I go there, I know how to fight. I know how to shoot. But the thing that I had more than anything that my general was interested in was I had no connections to Mexico whatsoever.

I was a blank sheet. And in Mexico, like I was saying, there's a lot of of really, really valiant, brave people that are agents that are trying to make the world a better place. And they get sold out on the American side of the border because they're looked at it as like unqualified, untrained. I'm going to tell you right now, we've had Mexican special forces Gaffa train us. I've got pictures that I'll give you two where we're upside down, Australian repelling with no hands, with our weapons. From several stories up, I mean, just very, very, very good training. and not everyone, it depends on what level you are, Mexico, your level of training,

but the training is very good, but what is the dynamic that's crazy, off the chart crazy with Mexico, is everyone's going to be trained to that level in your corporation that you're working for, whether it's municipal, they're not trained that well, but state level and up, you're getting like for real training because unlike FBI, HART, or unlike FBI, HART, or unlike, SWAT or anything like that that are specifically sent out to go deal with cartel type operations that's your everyday work right that's what you're doing every day yeah it's lunch and tacos literally and then someone's getting shot out sometimes it'll happen you go to fuel up and you have a semicircle and you're creating a

perimeter and make sure that you're not coming by and a victim of an imboscar or an ambush because it happens. It's just, it's for real. You're, you're, I went for an interview with the, I wanted to become an agent for the ministry,

judicial police. And, uh, the guy got out of prison, the director, the guy interviewed with, got out of prison and they killed them. And it's just like,

this is where you work, dude. So, I mean. How difficult is, is basic? Are they, are they hazing you a little bit?

Yeah, no, they're trying to run you off. Like, I don't know. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not going to,

cuss, but they would cuss at you in Spanish. At the time, I still smoked. So I'd be like sitting there running several kilometers and like, no, Frank, you like to smoke, light up. So you sit and they're running 10 miles or 10 kilometers through the desert smoking cigarettes with no water. And they're trying to get you to quit. And like I told you, I just quit a $100,000 a year job. My daughter's in rush. I had nothing. And people don't know what it's like. People know what it's like for immigrants to come to this country, start over. Some expatriates know what it's like to go to another country and start over with a bunch of money. But not a lot of people know what it's like to go for making $100,000 a year job to, I've got my check stubs over there.

5,277 pesos every two weeks, which is like 300 bucks. Wow. Every two weeks. And just getting absolutely brutal. You're getting lit up. And you don't know if they're going to kill you like one of my captains, copy I'm not going to leave the names out of it, but we're at, we used to have all of our trainings in Spanish. So you would have, um, fusil automatic unichero, for example, FNFAL, Fossil Atomatic Unikero, which is a light battle rifle.

You're saying all this in Spanish. And Fabrication, Belca, which means Belgian fabrication, you go through all the kilograms, what its effective distances. And you're writing all this down in notepads. I'm getting lit up by this captain. Like, why are you even here? You can barely write Spanish. And I ultimately wound up going to law school in Mexico. My wife worked three jobs that put me through law school.

But so I can write Spanish and speak it very well. But at the beginning, I couldn't. So I'm getting hazed, yelled at. They're trying to get me to quit. I think more than anything, they've got me there because I've got a blank slate and my general's checking me out. What is the benefit of a blank slate? You don't have any context.

At Mexico, when Calderon started the drug war, and we've got disagreements, people will disagree on when the drug war actually started. Calderon definitely started it, but his presidency, like, between 2006 and 2008, some people say it started in 2006. I like 2008, and I don't want to get too far off, but when they started the drug war, the benefit of a blank slate was to not have a, anything that could be used against me and what they call control e-confidence examines as they control a confianza because everyone that was military, everyone that was police or an agent

had to go to these background check exams and a lot of people were felon them just because their own friends from school would be found to be cartel affiliated or not even cartel affiliated, like straight up cartel. Right, because when you're 14, 15 growing up in Sina Loa, like you might work with the cartel for a little bit. It's going to happen.

Yeah. It doesn't mean that you're necessarily ahead of the cartel, but you're a part of it. You might have some familiarity. You definitely got some. And now you've got to go bust like this guy you've known since you were 10 from your home now. Here's Johnny Ringo coming in, and I don't have anything to do with anything. I mean, I barely can order tacos in Spanish. You don't have family there, so they can't blackmail you with that.

Nothing. I've got zero ties. So you're a valuable asset in that regard. Exactly. Because they know, well, if he does pan out in training, and like I said, I was very motivated on a scale of 1 to 10 of motivation. It was at 12 because I told Capiton that you can take me into the desert. You can shoot me. You can bury me. I'm not going to quit. I refuse to quit and I'm going to make it. And, uh, so what is day one on the job? You finally get through basic. You get

hazed, but you stand the test of time. You survive. Day one on the job is a thing called Ordon Serado to where they're immediately, you're living at base. You live at base. And they give you, They don't even give you your uniform yet. Initially, you're in a pair of blue jeans and you're in a shirt. They give you a hat that I have hanging up back here on this wall. And you're wearing that, and it's a white t-shirt. And you're running, you're chopping grass with machetes. You are just basically working out, cleaning base, doing everything,

just like they would do in the military here. And you're running through the desert. and just constant classes on human rights. They have a thing called Commission Nacional de Rrecho Sumanos, which is a big deal. Believe it or not, if you murder someone in Mexico, I'm getting into what day one on trainings like, murdering someone in Mexico will get you about 20 years in prison. If you commit a human rights violation, you're getting like 40 to 50 years in prison. So murdering someone's not even a big ticket item.

And human rights violation would be like, sexual abuse. Human rights violation can only be committed. This is what you're learning in in basic training. You are learning that the government is the only one that can commit human rights abuses. The cartel can't even commit human rights abuses. And the reason why is because the cartel doesn't have any governmental authority. So in order to commit a human rights abuse in Mexico, you have to have government authority.

I see. And so it would be in the United States, the closest thing to it would be abuse of authority on the color of law or violating civil rights on their color of law would be the closest thing. So you're going to classes and you're learning all these things because you're going to confront people that aren't going to pull over. They're not going to submit to being arrested. It's not that type of thing. And at the other times, you are going to be confronting normal people that might not be escalated to that level of confrontation. So you need to be able to treat them correctly too. So you're learning all these things in classes. So your instructions are a mix of either Gaffi Special Forces Officer,

normal agents, government lawyers that are teaching all of this. So you're going through this, and it's about six months, and you're going through and you're learning everything that you need to know, because the way that they patrol in Mexico is different, too. When you patrol, you're in the back of a truck,

and I mean, people have seen the movie Sicario where they're escorting the guys across the Mexican border. That's exactly how we work. So we're in the back of the trucks, and I was a sniper for my platoon. So I would be up in the truck in the first position while they got in the box. The first position would be your commandante,

then you would have your driver, and then up in the box. Usually we have four people. You got your platoon sniper, and then you have your retaguardia, and then you have, they're supposed to be two and two, but usually the way that they do it

is you would have your right and your left guard. And there's different configurations, but that's the one that we would always use. And the way that you would see them going out in a convoy. That's exactly the way that we go after cartels. That's virtually exactly the way it's done. Wow. So are you

going out trying to break up cartel activity? Are you just focused on protecting your general? No, no, no, no. My general is very, that depends on who you're working for. And it does depend on what time. My general, there's only two platoons that work directly

for him. And he's in charge of like all the state agents that work for the state. but because of the fact that he has so much know-how about the way everything operates, there's only two platoons that work directly for him. And I'm in one of these platoons, and I'm one of the platoons that works immediately for him. The other platoon is your help, you know, or your unad de appoyo is what they would call it.

So we work directly for him, and we're very trustworthy. Everyone there is ex-military. And we work, if we have, VIP guests we're going to take care of them like the Dalai Lama. Yeah, tell me about that story. When the Dalai Lama comes, like what? The Dalai Lama has his own security detail, just the way, the same way that the Secret Service would accompany President Trump or President Obama.

I've run into State Department employees coming to Mexico before when there's going to be a VIP detail. Every one of these people has their own security detail attached to them. So there's needs to be weapon clearances and stuff like that because obviously you're not just allowed to fly in and out of countries with your own weapons, unless you're on some type of diplomatic passport, which clearly the Dalai Lama would have. But even then, it's who's doing what, when and where, and how we're going to coordinate that, where we're going, different parameters that we need to set up and clear ahead of time. And it's funny because the day that the Dalai Lama showed up, one of the cartels there,

it hung two bodies in front of the, they call it CUDDA Administrativa, in front of the capital, right in front of the steps to the building is like kind of a just a signal to the government like, hey, we're still running things here. This is what we have to say about the Dalai Lama and people coming, and we want you to capitulate on whatever their demands are. And this is not just a Dalai Lama, but it's very surreal. My wife is a high-level reporter who was for a Mexican major news channel nationally. and she was interviewing the Dalai Lama and the feeling of her being in there interviewing the Dalai Lama and I'm sitting outside with a belt-fed machine gun,

a Negavengi-7 machine gun outside, guarding the most peaceful man on the earth, was just so surreal that you can hardly even understand it. But the necessity of that, because just at 4.45 that morning we were cutting down two bodies. And now they're doing a meet and greet, And I mean, just think about that. If the president of this country was going to Atlanta, Georgia or whatever,

to go do some type of, I don't know, event with the governor. And they had just got done hanging two bodies right in front of the state capitol. It would be a national news story. It would be national news. And they would probably call off the event because of security. And that's just, that's Mexico Daily Life. I mean, so. Wow.

What's up, people? take a break really quick because I'm going to talk to the fellas. Let me ask you something. Are you stuck? Do you feel like you're strongly with work or relationships or maybe your marriage or just feeling like you're not like the dude you want to be? You ever just, you know, thinking to yourself like, man, I should be farther along right now. I just get caught in these cycles where I just kind of lose self-control. Well, here's the thing that nobody likes to admit. It is possible that porn might be part of the problem. Yes, I know. I said the P word. And look, I don't want to be overly moralistic here, Okay, but if you're someone that struggles with pornography and, you know, research has shown that regular porn users actually leaves men feeling more anxious and less connected and ironically less satisfied and then it creates a cycle that then you got to be a little secretive about and you tell yourself like, oh, quit, and then you come back to the same cycle and now you're in a trap.

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does your audience know where you live? Yeah, I mean, I'm in New York. Okay. So when I came back to the States, I lived in Brooklyn, 24 Habemeyer Street. I don't live there anymore, so anyone that wants to go there, but I live there. And in Brooklyn, it's a great place, but just the irony of the fact that Joaquin Choppel Guzman

being over in the detention center in South Manhattan, and we've been looking for this guy all over the all over the place and I'm standing right outside in I don't know if your audience is if you've never been to south Manhattan they've got the federal detention center there it's a fortress like you can't even believe you can't drive in you can't drive out they've got it all blocked off and the irony that this guy's there is just crazy and so the cartels that we're operating there before they got wakene in new york and not in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

He was still there when I was working there. And that's El Mayo's son? Yeah, well, yeah, he's got his sons there. The Joaquin's children, well, it's all fractioned off now. So when you're talking about what cartels were working there, they had the golfos, they had the Zetas, they had the Cartel de Sinaloa, and those were basically the main three.

And where I worked in Zacatecas, I took my wife on vacation to Tamalipa. For example, there's no state police there. It's only federal police and it's only military because the state police were corrupt or they disbanded them. The entire area is run by golfos and Zetas fighting each other. So depending on where you're at in the country, there's usually going to be a cartel that's in charge of the area

or the state that you're in. Senaloa's obviously going to be the Senaloa cartel. Joosman now it's children. When I was there, it was primarily the Gulf Cartel and the Zeta cartel, and sometimes the cartel de Sinaloa would come in. And obviously, once they got Joaquin Guzman, it created a power vacuum,

and it was kind of like throwing an M80 in a goldfish bowl, and it just all the gravel or the substrate just went up, and now it's a free-for-all with all these power grabs. Yeah, it creates an interesting issue, right? You have these different cartels in different regions, and if you get rid of one of them or you take out the head of one of them, all of a sudden the other ones can then take over the region, and then as a result, they get more powerful.

It can, and I mean, I've seen some of the stuff that you've been into with the occult, and Narco Santianismo, Santa Muerre, when you take out the old cartel, and this is one of the things that I don't think that they really thought through when they did that, Joosven, whether you love them or hate them, and obviously most people are probably going to have a pretty strong feeling about that. Mexico, more than anything, if I had to come up with one word to describe or two words to describe Mexico, it would be hardworking and respectful. The Mexican and honorable, and even though the guy's running a cartel, he did have some of those traits and characteristics, leaving certain people alone, giving back to your community, whatever. When you, because he grew up with the Catholic religion, obviously Mexico's a Catholic country, when you remove something like that, not only you're,

creating a power vacuum, but you're also opening up the dynamic that younger generations, for example, I'm a Gen X or 55 years old. A lot of the people that grow up don't have the same values that I grew up with, maybe. And so now you've got these people with different values, a power vacuum, and they're really creating a state where it's ultra-competitive, the brutality's off the charts. You don't have the Catholic religion or the Bible constraining what you do on the earth with the threat of an eternal punishment because your Santamwera is just going to be like,

you know what, I'm okay with whatever you do, I'm going to help you and just be loyal to me, and that's it. So that was going on. And so the cartels changed. The Cartel de Centiola came over to deal with the Zetas, which were all Gaffei X Special Forces, which were previously, as most people know, the strong arm or laid down the law for the Gulf Cartel

and the cartel of the Centiola got tired of it. That's an important note that I don't know if a lot of people know that the Zetas were former military, that they were all trained in special operations. Well, it was a great way to go. Became their own cartel. I mean, it's pretty, I've heard that they're pretty brutal. Well, they're extremely brutal, but it's not just like it's the mentality that you get in the military is just, it's a lot different than civilian mentality. What do I mean?

We'd go to sleep and you would take your boots and your socks off so you get refreshed, but you would have your pants on you. You always got to make sure, and you make sure that your dress, uniform is always clean because the way that you look, you shave every day, you're on time, you're never late. We would work 43 hours straight with five hours off, 365 days a year, and you're never late, never drunk, ultra-discipline, and that's what it is in the military, because if you screw that up even once your job is gone.

I mean, yeah, your life is on the line. Well, it's, your life's on the line if you're an agent, too, but the military takes it to another level. For example, when you put your cover on your cap, it's two fingers above your ears. Everything is regimented on how you do it. So when you have the Zeta cartel conducting hits for you, and I want to bring in the Kaibili's too because it's not just the Ghafe's, which are special forces, and they're extremely competent at what they do.

But they're also contracting with Kaibis, and they think about everything. Like here's something that a lot of people don't know. the cabillis are Guatemalan special forces that the Zetas would bring in and people think Latino, Shmatino or whatever, Guatemalan is an El Salvadoran is a Mexican or whatever, totally not the case. Americans are mostly ignorant to the way that that goes on and there's a lot of animosity between all three countries. First of all because Mexico or Spain had taken over all three of them, Guatemala and El Salvador

both won their independence from Mexico. Guatemalans and El Salvadorans are often mistreated when they're going through Mexico. So they, Zeta cartel would hire Cabilli special forces to come work for them because when they're sending them out to kill people, they don't care

about killing them because they're not Mexican, they're Guatemalan. Oh, wow. So there's like a little twist. There's so many like little details on it that it's just, it's I mean, that's, yeah, it's interesting that there's, you know, even different sort of like forces that create different cartels from different countries that then get treated

different. Well, they bring in, they bring in exterior help. For example, there's a lot of people like, are the American military training any of the Mexican cartels in official capacity or an extra official capacity, both? Official capacity, what do you mean? Okay, so we sent in armed the Mujahadine to combat the Russians. And then we wind up several years later. fighting the same guys that we help armed.

Right. So they just got done with the military exercise in Yucatan with the Americans training the Mexican Marine or Samar, which is the Secretary of the Delamina, under the supervision of the Secretaria, the Defense of National, which is the Army. And they're training these guys, but who's to say that later on they get out and they need to make some money and now they're going to go and use what they learned to train the same cartels that the American military ones. And then who's to say, and this has happened that American military members have gone to Mexico

to go earn a huge payday to train people that a lot of times the cartel will kidnap people that are trying to go north. And you'll find these people in mass graves in Mexico and Zaka, because there's several masquerades. But they'll take these people and they'll put them in these camps to train them to work for them. and as long as they're making enough money and they're in dread fear, they can't escape.

If they try to escape, they'll be killed. So, hey, stay here and work for us, kill people, run drugs, whatever it is. These are Americans that will get kidnapped? Well, no, not Americans. They leave their hands off the Americans. These are trained Mexican nationals. These are trained, well, the Americans go down there

and train people, but the cartels will kidnap people that are trying to come to the United States from other countries. And they'll kidnap and force them to go to work for their cartel. I see. And if they don't do it, they'll be kidnapped, they'll be sold into human trafficking. I mean, I want to say this in the most respectful way possible, but almost every single woman that is from Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, that has been forced to cross the Mexican country. And I'm saying it completely from a humanitarian point of view with absolute sympathy or empathy for their position has probably been.

I mean, it's just brutal. And a lot of the men that come across probably have either been, well, all of them have faced the danger of being kidnapped by the cartel or subjected to being returned by the Mexican authorities. It's just a brutal thing. So there's a lot of dynamics. Do the Americans train the cartel? Yeah, there's people that are down there training them. Have I seen it personally? No, but there's other instances of where they've been found by intelligence to do it.

when you find a cartel camp, they just had that camp that was in Halisco. And you'll drive through several states because borders are not, like, cut along. And I hope I'm making this interesting. I don't want to bore you guys. No, not at all. The borders in Mexico aren't, like, drawn along parallels

or latitudes the way that they are in the United States. They'll follow creeks and stuff like that or rivers. So you have borders that are following mountain ranges, and you'll drive across several different states. they had a camp where they just found the personal effects of several thousand people. Thousands. Yeah, that were at a place to where these people were executed and found in a mass grave. And someone had asked me about that regionally.

And there's a military base in southern Sakatakis where we would drive through Halisco to go get to this. And when we're driving through Halisco, we would have municipal police with their weapons following us. And you don't know if you're going to get in a gunfight with them. So even the authorities from one state to another are compromised, sometimes depending upon regional allegiances to different cartels that are operating there. Yeah, I've heard people say that sometimes the municipal police can become its own cartel in a way. They can be sort of co-opted. They can be bribed.

This is probably the most dangerous police in the entire country are the least trained. And the reason why is because of their local allegiance to the criminal elements that are working there. And this isn't something that's just coming from me. other people have talked about this. When you're a general, they're going to move you around the country a lot because they don't want you developing regional allegiances with it. And your general will move every few years to avoid the elements that are directly under his control. For example, me being loyal to my general as opposed to being loyal to the Republic of Mexico.

Or someone that's working at a state level becoming loyal to their governor in Mexico it's a six-year term, but the municipal police never move. Right. They stay there. And they build that allegiance. That's right. And they've been there for a long time. They've been there for 10, 20 years.

The family lives there and they're there. They're anchored in like a tick on a dog. I mean, they're not going anywhere. And it's a big thing. And so in order to combat this, Mexico has come up with the thing. And other people have talked about it. They call it Basse de operations mixed, or mixed operational bases, where the Army, the Marine Corps,

the state police, the federal, and the municipal police will all go out together on control in an effort to try to combat it, but also to federalize the entire country. They have this thing called Mando Unico, which is Central Command, that just runs the entire thing from a federalized level down to it, all the way down, top to bottom, which is kind of, we're seeing that play out in the United States today, but this isn't a discussion on the United States, obviously. In Mexico, that's how they do it. And so they've got mixed operation bases where you'll go out.

And they'll go to a military base typically. They'll have the head of the government ministerial police for the state, ministerial police from the federal level, and they are different. The military base for the Sedena or the Army, the military base for the Marines, and they'll all go together and they'll have their meetings, and then they're going to decide what they're going to do based on the intelligence they got.

And then they'll go out. but the municipal police typically play a very minor part in that. And there's some different reasons why. One of the main reasons is because of what I just stated is a lot of them are directly involved, sometimes willfully, but a lot of times out of a direct threat against their own family. Even members of my platoon that have since moved on that became chief of police and neighboring cities have even had threats against their lives. So that it's just, I don't know.

I don't want to get too far off track. No, that's fair. I'm curious, what are some specific stories of times while you were there on duty that your life was threatened? That my life was threatened. They shot and killed. That my life was directly threatened. We had a two-hour, well, ah, man, how do I?

I say it. I don't know if I should go into the two hour and 45 minute shootout that was at the cartel. Yeah, I mean, just take me through the story. So what happens? Where are you? When do you get the call? And how does it unfold? Okay. My wife thought I was cheat on her one night. Because of the threat based, there are members that work for the cartel that even are dressed in the same uniform you are. So every night when I would leave base, well, not every night, but every two nights when I'd leave base, I would call my wife and I would tell her, hey, I'm on my way home. And it's seven minutes from base to my house to our apartment. And so I would call around and be like, hey, I'm on my way home. I'm getting a taxi. And a lot of times the taxis are working for the cartels, so you don't know.

And because it's late at night and because it's base, a lot of people don't like being around base because we're bad news too. So when you're trying to get a taxi, they don't want to come over. So we'll get a taxi. I'll call my wife. I'm on my way home. And right when I was going to get to taxi, I called her until I was in my wife. way home and we get this call that they're killing municipal police and Martinez Dominguez so we're like boom and I'm already like just putting my shirt on we're getting our

weapons we're back in the truck and we're going to confront a convoy a cartel that had just taken out some municipal police and we're going to go catch him and so we get there and there's this a royal which is like a creek and we're in like complete darkness and they just shot a municipal cop in the head And so he's dead. And so we're going through, and there's these people running through the creek at night, and we get one of the guys. He takes around through the face right here, the 223, and it blows out the back of his head,

and it dropped him so hard, so fast that he was carrying an AR-15 in his right hand, and he had a black backpack in his left hand, and the shot hit him so hard so fast that he fell over and it bent his right knee back, and he didn't even have time to let go of his weapon or the backpack, and it just stopped him. But we're looking for his friend in the middle of the night, and I turned on my phone, which you wouldn't usually do. And so we're like in, I don't know if you can imagine it,

but we're along a creek at the end of, we're along a creek in the middle of the night. It's like 1230 or 1 o'clock, because we're looking for these guys, and they just killed some cops, and we got one of them, I was just telling you the guy that we got with the backpack. And we're looking for the other ones.

And so his buddies are out there and we're looking for them. And usually when we're on an operation, we wouldn't have our cell phones turned on because obviously it's going to give away your position. My wife thought I was supposed to be home at seven minutes. I'm looking for these cartel guys. And Mexican chicks a lot of times, they're like mother hens. They're like on you, like where are you at?

You're fighting a battle on two fronts now. Yeah, you got the cartel here. My wife's blown up my cell phone and we're looking for these cartel assassins in the middle of the night, man. Who are you more afraid of, be honest? Yeah, of course. I'm afraid of my wife, man. She's going to be like, dude, where the hell you're at? I know you're with some chick.

You're supposed to be home and she thinks like, and I don't drink at all. I don't drink. I don't smoke anything. So my wife's blown up my phone. I'm like trying to turn it off, trying to turn it off. And I'm looking for these guys. I got to rip the. battery out of it because she keeps blowing up my phone and my wife's a reporter that works for the

government too so she's this plays into the story long story short i have to rip out the battery out of my phone because she keeps calling it wondering where the hell i'm at and we don't finish up until like 3 30 in the morning because we're looking for these guys they just smoked a bunch of cops dude so how long does it take to get the rest of them like what do you have to do we didn't get the rest of them the two of the other two got away oh wow so we got one of them you're gonna leave out which one respects a big deal and so if you ever and i have family in mexico to this day so if it seems like you want my last name you got my last name you know i'm in here in portland orregon i'm not hiding anything and when you put on a uniform in mexico it's like getting married because at any

point in time going forward any cartel that could be out there watching this um they can just take issue with you and decide that hey you know what we're just going to go get that guy and that's it. That's the way it is. That's the deal that we make. When you put on a uniform and in the United States, I don't know what it's like to put on an American uniform, but when you put on a uniform in Mexico,

every Mexican that's ever worn, El Tris or La Bandera, the Mexican flag on their uniform, that's the deal that they make. You know what? You can come and get me and take me at any point in time. And that's just the way it is. So their buddies get away,

but you don't ever want to be disfuscary. respectful to somebody because that's just like begging for it. Yeah, of course. No, I'm not asking to disrespect them. I'm not going to disrespect them, but I will be like, hey, they shot a couple police and one of theirs was shot. Were they firing at you? Yeah, they were firing. Yeah, it was a firefight. They're fighting and then they get away. And there's this big, there's kind of like a water reservoir where this is taking, where this is going on at. There's a creek that flows into a Royos Creek. And so Martinez-Dominguez, you can look it up on a map.

leads into a reservoir. And so obviously they're getting away and it's complete pitch black. I mean, there's, and so after a while, we're tactically going back. And when you're going back, you have like retroguarillo

where you're taking turns, leapfrogging back and forth, tapping each other on the shoulder when it's safe because you're taking up cover because they'll kill you. It's not a joke. And I mean, anyone that wants to look up

there's fire fights on top of all of this is on YouTube you can look up any of the they call them Balacetas in Spanish there's plenty to choose from you can pick one and there's plenty to choose from exactly from where I was working when I was working there and so you can just do the

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need to bring the thunder. And the best part is that we got a special deal for the listeners of this lovely program. Get your first month for free at bluechew.com. Just use the promo code Gagnon at checkout. All you got to do is pay five bucks for shipping. That's like a cup of coffee. All right. Five bucks for shipping. You're going to get free Bluetooth straight to your door. So upgrade your legacy. Let your name ring out for eons. And let's get back to the show. What's up, guys? I'm on the road. I would love to see you guys there. Obviously, if you don't know, I'm a stand-up comedian. And stand-up comedy is my passion. It's the thing I love to do. And seeing you guys all come out to the shows truly makes my life. I hang out after the show

and say what's up to everybody. So if you want to come through, check out the show, say what's up to me. It would mean the world. You can see me at all these dates and more on my website. Mark on live.com and I'll see you guys on the road. There's another one in Trancoso where there was also people that have been dead that was another gunfight. They'll shoot at you when you're going back to base and ambush you. One night there was a round into the, you'll have like a level three body armor, but then you'll have your ceramic plates on it.

And they'll shoot at you. There's another night and, man, I want to give you guys details. So one night we're in Trancoso, there was another by Via de Coz. So Via de Coz is another hot place where there's a lot of gunfights that go on. And sometimes you'll use different units. And a lot of the units, my main unit that I would use was a Ford F-250 that was completely armored. And I've got lots of pictures of it. And I'll give you guys some pictures so you can interject them into the thing if you want.

But they will. they'll be up there and sometimes they're like just going to try to like get into it with you and they'll shoot at you and one night there was a round that hit my uh my plate and another round that's hit six inches below him but we have a steel shield and so it's just crazy because in the united states you do they will have times where you're ambushed or something like that it happens once every blue moon but there it's just like the way things go just the way this warfare kind of functioned right it's not just me um There's another guy that has popular videos, and in fact, you've even had them on there.

And the dynamics between where we work in the country are a little different, one given the proximity to the Pacific Ocean and what their traffic is, and the geography and the cities and the layout of it. There it lends itself more to one cartel controlling the whole thing. Where I'm at, there's different cartels that are going to, going to get irritated with the government at different points in times for different things or have different agreements or lack of agreements that will provoke them to lash out at you or whatever.

Right. So it's a real war zone. There's multiple different fronts that you're battling. There's multiple fronts. And actually, it's kind of detrimental to the society as a whole and to any of the government and even cartel factions that are operating in the area because there's no peace. Right. And so because of this, and it does lend it.

to different stories like the evolution of Matazetas and Cartel de Nuevo Caneracion de Helico or Cartel de Colisco de Nueva Canoracian and even regional cartels, Los Templarios and other people that are all buying for power because Joaquin Guzman's no longer there controlling everything. And so... How many times have you been struck in a plate? Just once, only once. What does that feel like? It spun me around the side and happened so fast that I didn't even have time to really notice what

had happened. So you were in the back of your unit. I was up in the front of my unit. I'm always in the top of the unit. And. So just take me through that feeling. So, like, you get struck. Do you know immediately what happens?

Yeah. We were driving into Vida Coast, and there was already some things that were going on, and we were responding to a balacera that was already in progress. And so we're pulling up. And as soon as you get pulled up, you just get hit. Right off the top. You're like, right? And I didn't even tell my wife about it.

I've got a picture of my plate carrier. and the plate. But you don't tell her because your wife's just going to flip out. Yeah. Getting back to the story. And I'm going to get into that. So the story going back to the Martinez-Dominguez gunfight, my wife's blowing up my phone, I take out,

and I'll go back to the Vida Coast gunfight. And there's gunfights you're going to get into. I take out the battery out of my phone because she's blowing up my phone, and I got to make sure that our adversaries can't locate me or any of my team members that I'm around. I take out the thing. She's blowing up my phone. Now she can't blow up my phone.

And we're looking for the other two guys and they get away. I get back to base like 3.30 in the morning. And my wife is pissed because I'm not home. I go home. I'm only going to be there. I'm going to keep this concise. I get home. She thinks I'm cheating on her.

And I'm like, dude, we were just into a gunfight all night. And I got to go back to base in an hour. The next day it works, She's at a function with the government, and the ministry agents ask her, you know, is Frank okay? And she's like, what do you mean? She's like, yeah, they were in like this huge gunfight last night. So at the Vico de Coast gunfight, I've got another picture where they tried to take out the driver of the truck I was in. So I got struck.

They hit a barrage on our unit, and I'm always in the front unit. So we're the units that took fire. and the driver's door glass and that's all it's about an inch and a quarter thick of bulletproof glass they would have killed the driver if it wasn't armored another round struck right below me on the shield that I was in another round struck my my plate and it happens so fast it's just you can't even so we all get off our vehicle and we're getting ready to go engage them and does it does it hurt you like it must feel like it didn't hurt because it hit me laterally Okay, so it kind of glances off you.

It glanced on me and spun me around. If it had been a direct hit, then, yeah, it would have. Probably breaks ribs and things like that. Yeah, I have not had that happen. It hit laterally, and I spun around, and we were jumping down because, I mean, you're so adrenaline-ridden by the time that happens. And you look, and you're like, man, am I okay? You feel okay, nothing?

Okay, good, let's go. And when we're training, we don't really, we don't really get a chance to, uh, I've heard Sean Ryan. Yeah, of course. Talk about some of his training with Blackwater, and their training's very good. We've never trained that way to where they'll do bag training, and they'll put you in a chair, and our CQB training was kind of like that. It was similar where you would get into a room, you would breach a door, you'd go into a room, and you have to clear a house or whatever. Their training, they would put a bag over your head and take it off and you have to engage, whatever. Our training wasn't like that.

so we didn't have people like shouting at us having to react to it we would have to just go through and clear different rooms so there's not really a way to prepare you for what it's like when you finally do get into a firefight with the cartel which is going to happen and in so could take us you can look it up there's several firefights there's several mass graves there's people operating in that area frequently and you never know when it's going to happen and because there's bossiest out operat semi-mixed us and there's pictures that I can give you where I'm standing right next to a member of the Mexican army you're going to react to this stuff collectively to go out and get whoever it is and you don't know what cartel allegiance there are you don't know it's just constantly so when I got hit that night we got off the truck we're deployed we're

clearing buildings because in Mexico no matter where you're at they've got a lot of things called Finkas, which are semi-constructed properties or houses that you have to go through, and these people will start building out these colonies by they call them Achilles like farming communities. They'll start

building out all these farming communities, so you have to go from one to the other to the other. It's very much urban warfare, like going into homes, clearing homes. It's 100% urban warfare because you're going in and these homes don't even have lights or doors. They're all partially. It's like a labyrinth of bricks.

and people have seen enough footage on Afghanistan or other things where they've seen combat footage there they're going door to door kicking in steel doors here it's more like gissie's brick structures that aren't even completely built or maybe it is a whole house so you don't know and you have to go through these things and people can be hiding anywhere and one of the most famous balacetas or gunfights in all of Mexico

happened right immediately before I got there called Balacetta de Florentia to where even state police had to dress in women's clothing to escape because there were so many cartels and the two cartels weren't even directing the conflict against each other or I mean against the government they were fighting each other and it lasted hours in fact my general was wounded in the helicopter because they didn't they were trying to respond it didn't have time to let the helicopter warm up

and when they were getting there the helicopter dropped out of the sky Oh, wow. Injuring my general. And this is the general that I worked for. The general that I worked for was a very honorable, noble man that came from humble beginnings, went to school at Collecchio, a herelical militar, and became a two. In Mexico, they've only got three Eagle generals as high as you can get. So it's not like a five-star general.

So he was like almost a three-star general or three-eagle general when, before he retired. Wow. But that's Mexico. And so you have like a scale of violence to where even Mexican police that their main job is responding to cartel aggression have to dress in women's clothes to escape because there's so many members of the cartel running around killing each other. Wow. And they would let the women escape. They would let your chances of escaping with a woman much higher. Much higher.

Wow. And so that was right before you had gotten there. That was in 2011. Wow. So by the time you guys. there and you're in this gunfight. And I was there. I was in country in 2011. I was working at the aerospace factory while this is going on. And what I wanted to say is when you go to Mexico and you start out as a, you start Mexico as a tourist because you don't know what's going

on. The first thing that was when it really hit home is when I was still manager of the factory there. And they tell us at like 12 o'clock noon that, hey, we have to stop operations at this factory. This is a $60 million, $65,000 square foot factory. It's a big factory. And there's three different buildings in there. And so there's fabrications, there's composites, and there's machining. And I was in charge of machining and engineering. So they tell us, hey, at 12 o'clock noon, we have to stop. You have to get back on the bus and you're going back to town. And you management's getting in the van and you're going back to town. We're going back to town because the cartel is given the directive that every business in the capital,

city of this state has to shut down by two o'clock because if you don't we're going to come in and kill everybody because they're pissed off because certain businesses weren't paying them so they can force an entire business down the entire city and when we got back and i got back to my hotel and it was cartel de arcanto on avenue of hildago in the capital city of this state they shut down every business all the businesses were shut with just the strict threat of cartel violence, because if you don't capitulate to the cartel demands, they're going to come in and they're going to clean house. Wow.

And that was when I first started working there. And I was like, whoa, what did I get into? So how does this firefight end, the one where you got glanced with the bullet? Glass, we wound up getting several of them. And we arrest them. As soon as we arrest somebody, we have to turn them into the peccate. Because is military or state police or federal police, if your Policia Preventiva,

the Mexico law enforcement is structured differently. It's not like it is here. Here, a city cop, state cop, state trooper, whatever, can go down to their station. They can write up a criminal demand against whoever. In Mexico, it's not that way. In Mexico, you have Policia Preventiva, whether it's state or federal,

and then you have Policia Ministerial, whether it's state or federal. So, Policia Ministerial, going to be the people that you will turn the people over to that you arrest or apprehend and they will be the ones that are in charge of processing and booking demands policeia preventiv or like my general or whatever we're in charge of going out and confronting the aggressions as they happen because we're the ones that are kitted up to do that but we don't have the ability even though we have lawyers that work directly for us we

don't have the ability to go down we do have the ability they're lawyers but it's not our legal responsibility for the Mexican Constitution, the levy charges against anyone. It's our responsibility that as soon as we catch them to turn them in, good condition, to the ministerial police, whether it's at a state or federal level, depending on the crime, and what they were doing, and that's how that goes. So that night of the gunfight at Via de Coast, we got these people, and we had to turn in the people that we had gotten, we had to turn in their vehicles that we had captured, and we had to turn them.

that night we wound up at the PECere de Procariere, Canada de la Republic, which is a federal deal, and turn those people in. That's how it all ends. And so we're standing there in front of the federal base with the subjects turned over to them and with their vehicles, and they're going to decommission their vehicles, or sometimes the Marines might even use their vehicles, but we stand there all night and turn the people in away from the process. This is their legal paperwork. Wow. Or if there are dead people, semaphore will come in and collect a dead, but only after there's an investigation there's an investigative team that comes out and looks at all of that well and that that firefight who which cartel was that with uh that firefight was i believe it was with the gulf

cartel wow now was there ever an operation or some type of mission by a cartel to kidnap the general that you were working with no our general lived at base oh wow so he was pretty protected and fortified so yeah our generals um absolutely lived at base there's a section of base in fact there's a base there's state police there but there's a section of it that's apart to where nobody's allowed to go if they're armed and we're the only ones there that are armed. Did you have to deal with

any kidnappings and try to retrieve people? No, that I did never do. That was a function of the state police ministerial agency that has a squad that's directly dedicated to that and they're also a federal police district

right next to the Coca-Cola plant that's also dedicated to that. depending on like it is in the United States, whether they're being moved throughout different states or if it's something that's being conducted just within the state. That makes sense. Now, you had mentioned before these mass graves.

What is the purpose of these? Like, why do these exist and why do the cartels utilize mass graves so often? There's a, it really depends. Okay, for example, and I want to be concise because you're asking about mass graves and why they're being utilized. It depends on being who's killed and for, and why.

A lot of times when there's a gunfight between two people or two different cartels, feuding factions even within the same cartel, they won't necessarily want the dead people. They'll police their own dead. They'll go around and they'll get their own dead. And obviously they're not going to turn them into the coroner. So they will clandestinely get rid of their dead people. And sometimes they'll burn their own with diesel fuel. sometimes it just makes sense to dig a big hole in bury them.

Other times there'll be people, migrants that are passing through or transversing Mexican territory, that they'll see something they shouldn't have, have knowledge of something that they shouldn't have come upon, have knowledge of people that people don't want their identities recognized. There's a whole litany of motives on why they might be killed. and so a whole group, a whole train of people could be murdered that way. And we've gone out to help mothers try to like police their own or recuperate their own dead with mass graves that are found and go out and escort them to try to identify the remains of people. And Zach could take us there are several mass graves.

So really a mass grave could be anything from two warring cartels to four immigrants, that just happened to come along and see the wrong thing and be murdered for that reason, or even politicians or other people that are local to that, that aren't migrants that had something to do with the cartel, bad drug debt, for example, that they were dealing drugs like somewhat plaza boss that falls out of favor and they just go and they deposit their deceased victims there. Wow. Now, all the cartels in the region that you were working with.

Right. What was their main source of revenue? Were they all drug cartels or did they? Primarily drug cartels. And what was the main drug that they were operating with? There was a lot of cocaine and heroin where I worked with. There's a golden, they have a thing called the Golden Triangle in Mexico. And that goes back to the Chinese migrants when they started working there at the turn of the century.

And not the turn of the 21st century, but the 1800s leading into the 1900s, the Chinese were cultivating opium for their own use. as we were talking about that ultimately wound up into the Golden Triangle, Sinola, Sonora, and even parts of Durango, and Durango is the neighboring state to Zacatecas. So there will be cartels that operate within a region, and obviously these cartels are operating in different states, but they would be primarily making weapons or making money trafficking cocaine and Mexican Brown-Tar heroin throughout the state.

in the state that I worked in, there's two main highways. There's Highway 45 and Highway 54, and even though they got the same numbers, there's two different highways, and they're both used for traversing weapons throughout the country and also cocaine and other things that are coming up through the Central America throughout the entire country all the way north.

Some of these cartels are making billions of dollars. They're making billions of dollars. They have their own submarines. In fact, there's even a Coast Guard video. Yeah, I've seen this. To where even the Coast Guard video is getting on. Do they jump on top? I mean, they jump on top of it.

And that's just a level of sophistication. And tech and money that goes into these cartels. Everything that goes into it. Their tech, when you leave government service, or if you find out that you could make a lot more working for a cartel, doing the same thing that you're being paid for and have been trained for by the government to do, or have been educated to do and then you go and you

find out that you can make five times at working for the cartel. Some people do that and their level of cybersecurity, their level of working for the governments and even buying politicians, there was a vice president of Mexico that was getting 400,000 pesos a month.

So just their level and their range, they have complete sections of the Mexican government and your other guest has talked about every six years, because that's a political cycle in Mexico, they will reinvent something to try to eradicate cartels. That's the level of capability and reach that they have. Wow. Now, President Trump recently, especially when he was campaigning,

has talked about doing some type of tactical war in Mexico. And I think right now there's even sort of like spy drones and surveillance going over Mexico. There are. There's CIA drink. CIA drones going over there, but what I want to talk about, what I want to bring up is we were talking about corruption. They have border patrol agents that are bought and paid for in this country already. On the American side. On the American side.

This isn't even something I'm saying. This is documented news that's come out. Other major news stories or news companies have come out. LA Times and New York Times have covered this. So if they want to conduct some type of tech war against Mexico with the CIA flying drones over, the CIA's been found to have been selling cocaine to fund their war in Grenada and other things in LA, of which of where I'm from. Right. I was privy to all that when that was going on.

Operation Fast and Furious. Right. Operation Elder Eric Holder and demanding executive privilege with weapons that were fighting in Mexico. Right. So when we talk about conducting a war, are they really serious about conducting it? Because if they were, they'd have to look on both sides of the fence about people, that yeah, they're conducting surveillance and stuff, but how effective is that war really going to be?

Yeah, what should the American public be aware of before they support or don't support some type of military action? I'm glad that you asked that question, because in Mexico, what we have to be aware of is when you support a war like that, you're talking about supporting a war that you're comfortable living with. You're talking about supporting a war,

that you're comfortable sending your husband out there in uniform, but knowing that you as a mother of your own children, and you're going to confront the violence of that directly because those same Sicario's or hitmen are going to be there looking for you. That's the type of, it's a war that everybody has to fight. And when we talk about a war with Mexico, you have to bear in mind that the cartels are running grow operations

in Northern California, even here in Oregon and other places. This isn't my intel. This is other people's intel. And that they already have operatives here in the United States. And to be honest, I had to think twice before I wanted to do this video with you. And why is that? Because I've been completely in a Mexican uniform

operating in a Mexican country for a Mexican government. And now I'm here in the United States, having carried weapons for the government of Mexico, knowing that I'm talking directly to my American government because I'm an American at the end of the day, knowing that I've operated over there. And the American government doesn't know what team I'm playing for. and I'm doing this because I made an agreement to try to do the right thing to make sure that drugs don't wind up in the hands of children.

And I want to make sure that I do the right thing to my own fellow Americans. And I am deeply patriotic to this country. I'm also deeply patriotic to the Mexican country because I've borne under this flag. And I also bore the Mexican flag trying to do the right thing to make sure that children don't suffer the way. I had to suffer the way that my brothers and sisters suffer. with drugs. So if I'm talking to the American public and even the Mexican, the Pueblo de Mexico, I want you guys to know that before we get into some drug war, like we just got in the war with Afghanistan that lasted 20 years, cost several trillion dollars, and in the end,

we wound up giving the same opponents $7 billion in weapons that were left with them, with the way that the American military withdrew from Afghanistan. And now these same people are in the same problem that they had initially or worse, because now there's a lot of people that have cooperated with the government that lost, that we know and that we think thoroughly about the same war that we're going to start right here on our border. And that's kind of what I want people to be cognizant of, that it's your sons and your daughters and yourself that's going to have to confront this level violence because don't think that it's just going to be troops sent to some other border.

It's going to be a worthy spot here too. And that worries me, what does that look like as far as Marshall Law goes? Is this something that we really want to get into? In Mexico, they have a thing called Zonans de Toleranacea or Tolerance zones to where they are allowed to have, they're basically toppless bars and prostitution goes on there. And there's probably drug use that goes on. and we basically steer clear of these zones. This market exists because Americans want it.

They consume all of these products. All of those dollars that are generated to buy these subs and buy all the weapons, buy all the technical and tactical know-how. It's all funded by people that are purchasing these products, which means that they want it, Mark. I mean... Right. Yeah, I mean, Americans are buying the cocaine.

100%. Canadians are buying it. They have... I take issue with grifters. There's a lot of Mexican reporters that have reported on this for a long time that speak Spanish. They're in Mexico. They live amongst it every day. I just want us all to be educated in talking about what really goes on there.

I mean. Yeah. So I'm curious what can be done with the cartel power vacuum that exists in Mexico. If a, I mean, I agree with you. Some type of tactical war where we're actually sending American troops in Mexico seems like it's fraught with issues. I can solve the drug war right now, but they won't do it. What is it? Legalized drugs. Legalized drugs flat out, but you guys won't ever do it. And I hate to say it because I've got a whole envelope full of paychecks where I was paid $600 a month. The Mexican government paid $600,000 pesos to train me in basic training. And right now, how many millions and millions or billions of dollars are we spending? In fact, I read in law school the Affordable Care Act by the Obama and there was several, several thousands of shotguns and other things that were going to the

IRS. How many billions of dollars and trillions of dollars, even the Department of Defense can't even account for in its own audits? Every year, they've failed like eight audits in a row. There's that amount of money going into Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and all these other big defense companies. You could legalize drugs right now. You could, yes, people are going to die. it's sad and I am very sympathetic to the people that are dying from fentanyl. But if you legalized drugs and made it a legal product the same way they've done with alcohol, you would have to get rid of your addiction to the defense industry, all the millions that are going to the FBI, Department of Homeland Security,

ICE Immigration and Customers Enforcement, all of this goes away. And if they directed that money and put it into the economy, I'm going to tell you something. One night we were at that Via de Coast gunfight, and I used to carry 10, 20 round magazines plus one of my weapons. So it's 220 rounds of 7.60 by 51 millimeter 308 ammo. And I thought, wow, it's a lot of power. And the next day I got back to base and I felt like this big

because I thought you're an idiot because you could dispatch 220 of your enemies. But the very next day there would be 300 people waiting to take their spot, which is the reality of the drug war in Mexico. and not even all of those people would be like some poor immigrant. They'd be people that go years looking for a job in Mexico. And I found that out. When my general retired, I went everywhere looking for a job like, hey, how did you wind up in law school in Mexico? It took forever to try to find a job.

And I got a job working for a law office making $35 a week. And you have people that don't have the benefit of an education or had a government job that lost it because the new regime comes in. They lose their job and where are they going to go? They don't have any other place to go but the illegal drug market. So if you took all the money that you guys are spending, paying for all these agents, paying for people to be killed, because in the end of the day, that's the product that it, the product that it produces is dead bodies, mass graves, drug addiction.

And it's something that we're just stuffing the money into government agents and soldiers and all of this and they're okay spending that but they won't spend it to help better somebody's life through education or business opportunities so if you wanted to legalize drugs you could end the drug war tomorrow but they won't do it and that would completely incapacitate the the economy of the cartels yeah well i mean they don't how much you have big tobacco for example in this country nicotine's a drug everybody consumes it you have coffee it wouldn't incapacitate the money of the cartel or the the economy the economy of the cartels, the bankroll, but it would force him to become something that is overt and in

the open to where, at least at that point, at a societal level, is something that they could begin to regulate with the input of the American public and even the Mexican public or Canadian public. They could come together and have a basic consensus on what they're okay with and what they're not. Yeah, that's fascinating. Well, Dave, I have a couple of the questions I want to talk about like Santa Morta and like the occult nature of a lot of these cartels. We're going to save that for another episode. Okay. Thank you so much for sharing your story on this and your expertise.

You're the man. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. What's up, people? Quick announcement. If you are a fan of Camp Gagnon or Religion Camp, I have great news because we're dropping history camp.

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