Julian Dorey Podcast - #427 - “Complete DESTRUCTION!” - Narco Death Zones, Iran & CIA’s Mexican Hit Squads | Stefano Ritondale

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

SPONSORS: 1) HENSON SHAVING: Just head to https://hensonshaving.com/julian to get a free 100-pack of blades with your razor purchase 2) MCG TACTICAL: Grab your Stinger now before this deal disappears and visit https://mcgtac.com/Dorey JOIN PATREON FOR EARLY UNCENSORED EPISODE RELEASES: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey CLIPPERS DISCORD: https://discord.gg/8QmWEKJ3BT (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Stefano Ritondale is a military intelligence analyst, defense technology executive, and prominent subject-matter expert on Mexican drug cartels and regional security trends in Latin America. He is widely recognized for tracking the evolving tactics, militarization, and territorial control of transnational criminal organizations. FOLLOW STEFANO: YT: https://youtube.com/@allsourcenews?si=tQyCJ_fdEWlBuQLj X: https://x.com/all_source_news?s=21&t=sfqubsp5OipDY-MIDoR7VA IG: https://www.instagram.com/all_source_news?utm_source=qr WEBSITE: https://sitrep.artorias.com/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@all_source_news?_r=1&_t=ZT-96grCTgEUQv FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY YT: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://x.com/juliandorey ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Stefano’s Cartel Intel Journey & Military Background 09:35 - Intel Operations, Iran Threats & OSINT Growth 21:05 - Military War Games, ODIN & Intelligence Misconceptions 29:09 - Soleimani Strike, Iran Response & War Simulations 40:37 - October 7th, Iran Weakness & Israel Debate 51:14 - Iran’s Limited Response & Strait of Hormuz Risks 1:03:32 - Maduro, Iran & CIA Assassination Allegations 1:11:20 - Cartel Power Structures, El Chapo’s Heirs & Loyalty 1:23:54 - El Mencho Ops, Cartel X Accounts & Community Intel 1:35:04 - OSINT Theft, Cartel Territory Maps & Escapes 1:46:04 - Kingpin Strategy, Fentanyl Labs & Global Cocaine Trade 1:55:12 - Border Cartels, Chinese Weed Markets & El Mayo Capture 2:04:55 - El Mayo Setup & Untouchable Cartel Figures 2:10:20 - CIA, Cartels & the Future After Iran/Maduro 2:20:18 - CIA-Vetted Units, FBI Credit & Pacific Drug Routes 2:32:59 - Cartel Business Models, Oil Smuggling & Cienfuegos 2:48:48 - Fixing the Cartel Crisis & El Mencho Death Theory 2:58:43 - CJNG Leadership Shift & Cartel Stabilization 3:09:30 - Terrorist Organization Debate & Possible US Cartel War 3:12:38 - Stefano's Work CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 427 - Stefano Ritondale Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stephanie, thanks for coming, man. No, thank you so much for having me. This is great. Canarina Schultz said you're like one of the guys to talk to when it comes to Intel on the ground in Mexico with the cartels. I mean, Katerina is a great friend. Both of you are mine. You know, she's awesome. So shout out, Kenarina.

Thank you so much. I know she was the one who put us in touch. So I really appreciate it. But yeah, I mean, I've been focusing on Mexican cartels and started out as a hobby. A hobby. It was, yeah. How do you have a hobby of like focusing on the cartels? Just like one day.

You know, all right. So that's a good question, right? So how did this happen? Well, you know, I was, you know, former Army and while I was active duty still, I did a lot, I deployed to Jordan during, you know, Operation Inherent Resolve, which was the whole counter ISIS fight, right? And when I was in Jordan, and even before that, when I was in college, I really liked back then Twitter, like the growing of this open source intelligence community, right? Like, oh my God, like, these guys are really good at what they do. And I even saw during my time, when I was deployed, like, oh my God, you know, Twitter, there's a lot of information that gets pushed there that is extremely well that a lot of us use. Right. And so I thought to myself one day, you know, I was an active duty and I realized that on the English speaking sign, because, you know, I'm a first generation American. My mom was born in Mexico.

My dad was born in Argentina. So I speak fluent in Spanish. I lived in Spain. And when- Native Argentine? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

He was born and raised. and then he moved, like, in his 20s to Italy. Grandfather was Italian, right? Okay. You got to ask these questions. No, Italian. I'm just saying, you know. No, he moved, but I think my grandfather moved there in 1910 when he was a kid.

So, but I have to put that there. All right. You passed through. That's fine. But my mom from Mexico, I had family in Mexico. And so I started to realize that even before I really got into involved in, like, kind of the cartel dynamics, that all these OScent account. on Twitter back in the day were very focused on Russia, Ukraine, right?

They were focused on the Middle East. There were some that focused on Africa, but for some reason, like South America and Mexico specifically was ignored from the English-speaking side. And it's crazy because on the Mexican Twitter and in Mexican social media, there's a huge swath of these cartel observers in cartel. Like you would call cartel-Ocent accounts like back in that day, right? Massive and amazing information.

It just seemed like really weird. Like, huh, why isn't that on the English side? And so while I was on active duty, I did kind of two missions. I was a battalion S2, which is like the intelligence officer. I did four weeks. I went to Mexico to train the Mexican army. It was me. Train the Mexican military police before the National Guard was created.

It was the Mexican military police. I was with a military police unit in El Paso, the 93rd MP Battalion. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. And they sent us four weeks to Mexico to train them as me, another officer and two NCOs, non-commission officers. Best Army experience I ever had.

Really? Oh, my God. You weren't worried about them working for the cartels. No, no. So we went to Mexico City, and then there's a, it's like outside. So it was during the week we would be in this Mexican military base, and in the weekend, they would drive us to the hotel in like prime Mexico City. In the weekends, we would do whatever we want.

I had family there, so they would pick me up. I mean, it was great, but interacting with the Mexican military police was amazing. I mean, these guys, right, like, if you, you know, like I said, it was deployed to Jordan. You know, a lot of us in the Army are very used to working with, like, the Middle Eastern militaries. I did another mission in Niger, for example, also five weeks. And you kind of, like, there's moments where you start, like, you pull your hair. You're like, why, you know, the professionalism isn't there or they don't get it or they're more in the military because they want the title rather than, let's say, the service. You know what I mean?

Like, there's a lot of that. And you can talk to anybody who said that, but when you go to Mexico, no, these guys are there because, you know, love of country, right? They are passionate about it. And they're a professional force. And so training them was great because it was like, oh, I get to train a professional force, which, by the way, could teach us some things, right? Like their ability to do, for example, like in the military, the MPs and the US MPs, technically it's like we can do, we're supposed to do like riot control, right? That's like one of the missions that they're supposed to do. the Mexican military police

they would back then, before the National Guard, they would also do riot control. But like when we were there, we realized, man, these guys do riot control way better than us. Like, what are we going to teach them? Because they do it all the time. I remember we were in the base and there was a moment in the,

they had an exercise where they had like literally soldiers acting as protesters, right? It was an exercise. And then they had the unit that was getting like certified, right? And so they did this whole exercise and it was like the, like the, the, the, the, the, said, and go.

It was insanity. I mean, the guys who were acting as the protest did not hold back. They were throwing, they fired firecrackers at them, rock, sticks. There was a moment, I kid you not, we saw from the distance, they grabbed one of the guys on the riot control. He was in the line, pulled them out, and then the protesters managed to push the MPs back. And then the guys who had the soldiers were beating him up. Oh, for real. Oh, dude, they were.

So then the MPs had to come in. in with the van with the water hose and just spray everybody. They did not hold back. And we had a week of training. I remember this moment. We had like, and our training material was like, you know, riot control for a week. And when we saw this, I remember we just looked at each other and we just crossed that whole off for the week.

We're like, okay, we're not doing this. They don't need. I even put a no like, hey, if you want training, they can train us how to do this because they don't. And then it was like they called it end and everybody just stood up. Hey, hey, that was great guys. We're really good. All right.

Compa, muy bien, and then they just left. Like, nothing. There's like a dead guy on the mouth. He just stood out bruises. He didn't care. But, you know, that's the thing. They were extremely professional,

and it was great experience. That's professional? Yeah, hey, man. I mean, that's like WWE professional. Well, what is riot control? You know, you had a lot of cops here. You tell them, get one that's right, you know, riot control.

Let's see what they say. Yeah. Let's see the Knicks win, New York in the finals, and then let's, yeah. Yeah, you have a, been to Philly apparently. That's true. That's true. But you know, so that deployment to Mexico and then I did a border mission during the first Trump administration, the first time he sent guys to the borders. Those two things kind of piqued my interest. Wait a minute. What did a border

mission look like while you're in the army? Yeah. And an active president sends you, I assume, to support border patrol? Or was it was a totally separate? So it was, we went there in 2018. It was literally the first time he did this right before the midterm elections. It was October, November of 2018 that he sends us. And the reason why they did that was because that caravan from Guatemala was going up through Mexico. Oh, I remember that. Exactly. And so what they did was our unit and the MPs they sent because we kind of had like the Northcom mission.

We were like the QRF. It's called Homeland Defense. And it's funny when they briefed us like, you guys don't do border security. That's called Disca. It's a whole term. And like, you guys don't do border defense. Don't worry about border defense. And the only mission we ever did was border defense.

It's like, oh, my God, okay, here we go. So what they did was they sent some of us, some of our units to like southeast Texas, Brownsville, like Laredo, that area. And then our battalion, they sent to San Diego. And then we were under the Marine Corps, the SP Magtaph. Okay. So we were part of that. And I remember in the briefing when the caravan, there was really two routes they could take.

They could take the quickest route, which was. was through basically hugging the almost like the Caribbean coast. And then they would head up to Brownsville, Texas. The problem there, though, that was the most dangerous. Because back then, the Gulf Cartel Civil War was terrible. So, and they were specifically targeting migrants because it was easy money for them, especially extortion. Or they could take the long route, which back then was the safest route, which was San Diego.

And that's where we, you know, were sent in. And that's where the caravan actually, for the most part, ended up was in San Diego. And to your point, our, yeah, we were just, we were like, standing there waiting. We were just waiting. The Border Patrol was the lead. And then we would, like, do build Constitina wire over the border wall. And, you know, the Marines would build it. And us as the, well, I was the Intel officer.

I wasn't doing that. But the MPs would, like, protect the Marines who were the engineers that were building the constantina wire. And they would do that all across the border, right? We had that in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, everywhere. But what was funny was even back then. And they still do this. The problem of Constantino wire is like,

you can't just set it up and then just leave. It's not its design. So even if you put it on top of the border wall, so what they would do is people in Mexico would go to the border wall, see the Constantin, they would steal it. Oh.

And then they would sell it in Mexico. That's not great. And so it was like, so it was just this nonstop, you know, thing. Now, as an Intel officer, you have to be very, there's very strict laws in place because of the whole Vietnam War and Cold War.

Like, you can't collect on Americans and you can't do anything in the U.S. Well, they tell you he can't. Oh, well, I can tell you we, I was a severe, you know, I'm telling you, I was, I'm glad you followed the rules. I followed it a million person. Actually, like, good for you. So it would, you know, we would have soldiers come up to us.

I said, you know, hey, hey, this person, you know, was harassing us or taking pictures or stuff like that, you know, just we're putting it as soldiers too. Hey, this happened. And my first question is, does this happen to the US side or the Mexican side? It was like, US side? I was like, all right, don't talk to me. I cannot, I have to assume that's a US person. That's called US.

you know, I cannot be involved with that. I can't get an email about that. I can't talk. You know, you have to talk to, like, you know, law enforcement or other elements within the army. You can't tell that to an MI. My whole focus was south of the border. So the caravan, anything that happened. That was fair game for me.

But anything north? Absolutely not. So they're very strict about that. Like, extremely strict. I know most people might not believe that. It's good. They're strict in one place. A lot of places.

Read this. of shit, they're not too strict in other places. But, you know, I obviously like that's also literally a geographical jurisdiction in and of itself because you're at the point of the border and you're watching this and it's like, well, that happened there. That didn't happen there. So it makes it a little easier than I guess stuff when you're looking at wire tabs or if someone's flying with a multinational company somewhere and things like that. That's where it gets a little weird. But how long were you there when, when you like six weeks? It was like right before I was determined I was going to leave. Actually, my, I was going to, what's called ETS, like get out of active duty. I actually

had to extend it because of this to the border because they didn't have a replacement for me to cover down. But it was like six weeks. So when I did that, um, between that and the Mexico mission that I went there that happened both in 2018. That's when I decided why, well, let me try to cover Mexican cartels. And like as a journalist? As a hub, as a no, like I guess, I mean, I don't like calling myself an OScent account. I don't consider myself an OSINT account. People might call me that. I just, I think OScent is a different type of category that is more relevant. Like, if I track, for example, cartel members on social media, their messaging groups, there are all that. And I used to do this all way back in 2021. Like, there's some OSENT aspect of that, but not really. I get it. Your pronouns

are they then. That's good. But it started out just as. as a hobby that then became much more professional now. Actually, that whole reasoning is why now, you know, I'm a co-founder or company Artorias. You know, it's an open source intelligence company that uses AI to collect and analyze and alert information. And as the, you know, that all happened because of my account on Twitter, all source news.

Because the group of people I met, we kind of created this company. Now we have, for example, for the consumer sit rep, it's a global OScent app. that you can download and you can see what it actually entails, because I think we think that's the future as internet explodes and kind of grows around the world, AI is prime to be able to analyze large data sets and information. And so that's why, and we use it also to track Mexican cartels

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you'll get a free 100 pack of blades with your razor purchase. That's basically two years of shaving for free. Just head to hensonshaving.com slash Julian to grab the deal. That link is in my description below. Once again, that's hensonshaving.com slash Julian. Link in description to get a free 100 pack of blades with your razor purchase. I got a lot of questions. Before we get there, though. So you started like as a hobby exploring cartels while you're still in the army. So you didn't. Well, I was I was technically, no, by then I was in the reserves. I was in the reserves and then I was a contractor. But for the

government. Okay. So when you're a reserve slash a contract. you were allowed to start this account and do it. I didn't, you know, don't, you know. Didn't ask, okay. Apologized later, didn't ask permission. It all worked out. All my things that I did with the government had nothing to do with Mexican cartels.

Like that's one thing I did, like my focus as a contractor was, I actually focused on like our adversaries, their ballistic missile programs, cruise missiles and drones, specifically how they would employ them in conflict with a special emphasis on Iran. So like, Iran, yeah, right? February was very interesting. for me this year.

Okay. Let's take that detour real quick. So, yeah, that was my focus for six years as a contractor was that system because I worked for an air defense unit. And so I would build like when those units had before they deployed, they had to get a training exercise to like certify they could deploy. So I was like building all the exercises that. And I would build the enemy, the ballistic missile force for them to train and fight against and do

that. All right. So actually, let's totally take this detour because that's you were literally working in the belly of the beast of analyzing what Iran may have or doesn't have. First of all, how are, what types of intelligence sources from the contracting army side are you getting to be able to determine what weaponry they actually have? I mean, that's all government intelligence. I mean, there is obviously OSCE involved in that, but for the most part, anything like that, we're talking now like classified government type of stuff, you know, that kind of from a multi-agency

in Iran is always going to be one of the priorities for the intelligence community. And so that's kind of where the vast majority of information we use. And then you analyze not only, one of the things I would say is a lot of times, this might be a little bit too specific. I felt like a lot of people would focus more on like this missile can do X, Y, and Z. You can fie this long. It can maybe do this little thing.

It was very much centered on the missile system. And what for me and what we were doing, like that really is not as important for us. us. Why not? Because what we're training is how you're going to respond to them using, let's say, hundreds of missiles. So like in the end of the day, one individual missile system and how they operate and all that, that would be more for, let's say, the guys who are working the Patriots and say, you know, like, hey, how do we, there's this new system in place, how can we defeat this one missile system? My focus more was, forget, let's just say all out war broke out. How are these people going to employ hundreds of missiles in a war? And how the, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and that was

something that, you know, the military and the army, because of the global war on terror, kind of like, and coin, and you hear this a lot, like, Russia, Ukraine and all that, like, a lot of that was kind of forgotten or not forgotten, not emphasized enough. And so now, obviously now in February, 2026, with everything happening and the US Iran war, that's kind of re-centered itself and become a major focus, because now we get to see it for really the first time a country employ, or even in 2025 with the Israel-Iran, 12-day war, that's when we really saw a mass quantity of ballistic missiles launched in the first time in history. And in many aspects, a lot of countries are developing those capabilities to employ it.

And we've seen it with Russia and Ukraine as well, a China-Taiwan scenario as well. And so that's more where I wanted to focus up, because when I was back in, it was more like that individual system and what they can do rather than the holistic picture from a doctrinal perspective how they would fight. Okay. So when you were looking at it, though, back in 2018, 2019, 2020, until I guess like 2024. Okay. So yeah. So not that long before the 12-day war. You know, I guess the first question is, what kind of weaponry capabilities did Iran have relative to what other countries, even in the region, have right there? I mean, Iran has the largest ballistic missile force in the Middle East, right? I mean, that is a known fact. And they really

prioritize that ballistic missile force. And one of the things that they did a lot was, you know, they got from like the Soviet and all that and the ballistic missiles. And they really understand and realize, look, we can't, we're not going to develop the most advanced fighter jet. We're not going to develop the most advanced naval vessel. So the way that we can have a deterrence and even an offensive capability of strike back is one through the ballistic missile program. And then it expanded into their drone program, especially the one-way attack drones. So now, like, for example, the Shehead-136 is, they gave it to the Russians, the Russian called the Derron 2. That's a drone that very, not sophisticated at all, but very effective at what it's designed to do, which is go and do,

you know, pinpoint and go and conduct strikes utilizing a drone. And so, yeah, that's the one. The HESA Shahed-136. Yeah. So the Hes-Hed-136. Yeah. So the Hes-Hedon-36. Yeah. So the Hes S is the kind of the maker, right? That's like our Lockheed Martin and stuff like that, but that would be the one that's their head 136. And then the Russians, their equivalent is called the Duran 2. And they used it extensively in Ukraine. And the Russians kind of took, the Iranians taught the Russians about these,

like a lot of the ballistic missile specifically and the drones and how to employ that, right? Because the Iranians were really developing these capabilities for years and years of decades. And they kind of became almost like the subject matter experts in these capabilities because they understood this is how we can deter or defeat the United States or Saudi Arabia, et cetera. And if anything, other countries have taken notice and kind of followed a similar path in that to do that. But yes, I mean, so that's why when this all this happened, but I would kind of push back heavily in some of the reporting like, oh, how did we not know about this?

Did we do? You know, I would just, I'm going to quote General Votel, who was one of the former U.S. Central Command Command Command. and General McKenzie, who was also a former CENTCOM commander. And both on the media both said, no, we knew about this. Like, that is not up for debate. Like, we knew about this, we've done this, we understand it, both from the naval blockade, from the drones, from the ballistic missiles. And I think the problem is there is a, one, a misunderstanding on just what I really

focused on, which, again, I was a low-level analyst and the huge pyramid of U.S. Central Command. Like, I was at the bottom of the food chain there specifically to train. guys and these kind of capabilities within very, you know, military exercise and simulated exercises, right? To meet training objectives. But I think people mistake and say, oh, it's almost like,

oh, I didn't know they had this capability. So that means the U.S. government did it now. And, oh, because Iran did X, Y, Z. Well, nobody could have suspected that they were going to bomb Dubai. Well, yes. What the fuck you expect them? Exactly.

What are you talking about? Yes. Right. And then, but then there's a misunderstanding of, okay, well then how the UAE fights, Saudi Arabia fights, the U.S. fights, and all the, like, the things that happened behind the scenes and people try to oversimplify that response. And I think that's a fundamental issue where a lot of that reporting kind of gets erroneous and wrong. Because when I, you know, was kind of seeing things develop, I was like, oh, yeah, that's, yeah, like, we, we kind of

do. Yeah, that's exactly what they were going to do. And this is how the U.S. is going to have to respond to that, et cetera. So it's, yeah, I think it's when not that many people really focus so much on the ballistic missile, that's when I realized, even in the think tank world, right, and the most of the people outside of the news organization, they're going to get their analysis from think tanks. It became pretty clear that it wasn't a major focus for the majority of media organizations and think tank. And I think that's kind of like, I don't want to say contaminated, but kind of misinterpreted what is actually going on and how the U.S. military plan. to respond because again, if you have two CENTCOM commanders said, we knew about this.

Yeah. I'm sorry, X account on Twitter, don't argue that you know more than two former sentcom commanders who lived this for years. Sure. So you weren't looking though with the nuclear program or anything like that. You were strictly on the ballistic side and then the drones, the cruise missiles. And so like, I mean, think about it like this. Like my, our job was think of a scenario because we had to train these guys. And not only Iran, but anywhere. And the other way that the Army trains a lot specifically or joint exercises, if it's multiple, like Army, Air Force, Navy.

So you can have it like a specific threat template or you make up a country. So there's a whole made-up universe in the Army. Like, you can actually Google it. It's called Date. So if you Google Date Army, they have these whole made-up countries, right? They have De Novia, Ariana.

Isn't that in the movie fucking Princess Bride? Yeah, that's it. Oh, that was Shinovian. That's right. So that's Day World, right? So they literally, and these are great guys. Like, when I was in the Army, when I was a contractor, I would work with this organization specifically under U.S. training. Well, back then it was U.S. Training Command, U.S. Trade Doc, and specifically the G2, the intelligence section, like, their whole job is to make these world ups.

And so they have, and so, for example, you'll have like, oh, the Pacific. I think it's a. Schmorph. Yeah, whatever name you can think of. Here's the capabilities. Like, that's literally, see? Like, Ariana, Atopia, Donovia, Gorgas, these are hard as fuck. LaMaria, Pertini, and then into Indo-Pacific, Bagancate, Belizea, Gubal, Himmeldesh.

Yeah, no, I think some countries need to get some rebrands. It's pretty good. But that's literally, you know, and so then what you do is, then you can say, okay, well, that country, Ariana has, because then you look up with the World Equipment Guide. So, for example, you want to know, hey, that's the head 136. outside of Wikipedia, well, what's the range? Because you know, you can say, I don't trust Wikipedia.

World Equipment Guide, the Whag and the Army. And the Whag literally lays out, like, from an unclassified perspective, all they're, like, hey, this is, like, that's it. So right there, put Shahed-136. And this is available for anybody, right? Like, anybody can access this. As you can see, you don't need to,

there you go. Like, even that one, or, yeah, whichever one. And you... Shad-136, that? Yeah. And then you can see, right? The Durant, too. And then you could go variance, systems, dimensions.

Oh, this is cool. Right. Cost. This is like fantasy football for how to kill people. And they have this for everything. You can look up, T90s, T72s, probably the LeClerc thing, you know, whatever you want. And it's a whole, it's all right there for people to focus and analyze. And then in these exercise in these made-up worlds, you then grab and say, because you can even, you can even look up at the, like, in the scenarios.

They have it pre-built. Like, they already have, like, Ariana's 10th division is, this, this, this. And so you can just say, okay, I want this guy, I want this guy, and I want this guy, right there. Eurasia. And then you can look, Ariana, force structure, operational environment. It's like a whole story.

Whoa. And then you can... This is just publicly available. And these are, yeah, this is for anybody. And you could just click on it. Imagine what you fuckers have right there. Well, that's the, you know... This guy in for rent.

And then on the right side, you can see equipment breakdown. So you have the command and then the brigades, and then you click on the brigade. They had the, you know, the battalions, the battalions, the companies, the battalions, team. everything you can imagine. And so in a lot of these exercises,

especially in the unclassified world, we just say, I want this, this, this, this is the operational environment, and go. And then you build, you know, the exercise and you do that. And so you knew in 2020, 21, 22, 23, 24, at least roughly, as you laid out, what the capabilities are for a country like Iran and what they might do in a war game scenario.

Yeah. Because like our Middle Eastern correspondent, Nico Aronson, was in Dubai, like right before the bombing started. And they were like shocked that all this shit was getting bumped. But you were probably sitting at home going, yeah, that's about right. I remember even writing articles, you know, through the company like and all that. I was like, I actually had an interview published afterwards.

And I said, hey, if this happens, like anticipate airspace to close. Like the thing was if you go, if Trump, because back then Trump was saying regime change, regime change, like that was part of the conversation. It's like, if they go for regime change, all bets are off. Oh, yeah. Because that's because then what, what is Iran going to do? right? And so that's the thing. And so, and again, I want to preface this very important. We're talking about war games and military exercises. I have a, this is another pet pee of mine. Military exercises are, or war games, are designed to meet training objectives.

They're not designed to see who won. Okay, wait, that's not where I thought you were going. So that, so people need to understand when you do, so out, unless you're like at the highest level, right? and some of those conversation would be, for the most part, training exercises are designed, and military exercises are designed, because you have training objectives you want to meet, right? And so the commander is the one who decides that. So the training objective can be, for example, I want to strain our logistics, which is a broad base, right? Because how you do it is, and these are all things you can look at specifically in the Army, so each Army unit has what you

call your mission essential task. So the Army basically says you're an MP, you're a military police unit, these are your mission essential tasks that, I don't, these are the things you need to know what to do. Do I expect an MP to be an intelligence analyst? No, so that's not a missional essential task. Riot control, for example, could be one of them, right? So,

based on your mission essential task, then you build training objectives around that, because in the end of the day, you want to see if you get certified. And so when you build exercises and you design it, you do it mostly under the premise of saying, I'm trying to meet the commander's training objectives. So if I

to do between realism or meet training objective, training objective is going to be higher, a priority, right? And so this is where, and so for example, this kind of goes back, it's called the sandbox because then you make up a scenario that in reality, for example, you're going to have more than likely you're an army unit doing operations, more than likely you'll have air support, right? But I can say in this scenario, nope, I don't want you to have air support at all because I want you to train as if you don't. Oh, I'm going to flip a switch and say all communications has been shot down because our adversary

just shot down all our satellites. So fight, you know, analog without anything, right? Like there's no redundancy. All else went to fail. Go fight and execute that

because you're trying to see, you're trying to train your units on these certain objectives. And then people get that end result. Well, we had this amount of casualties, this amount of casualties, this amount of casualties. And then they say,

then this is where I'm getting back to, oh, Iran and this military exercise destroyed 10,000 American soldiers. Okay, wait. That's not... The perfect example is, I think there's a very famous one where... It was like a Marine General, I can't remember.

I think in 2003 or 2001, where he used speedboats and then those seed boats, he managed to sink an aircraft carrier. Right. With speedboats. And it's in a simulation. It was a simulated exercise. Right. But you see that reaction. That's my criticism.

So it's like, okay, wait, wait. What were the training objectives? What was the... And then what happened was after the exercise... after they sunk the aircraft carrier, the criticism is, oh, well, they just re-put the aircraft carrier there and then they continue operating.

I was like, well, yeah, because let's just pretend. Let's say this is a naval exercise and the whole exercise is centered around defending the aircraft carrier. The Marine General destroys it. That one, Millennium Challenge. That's the one. The reporting on this infuriates me.

Because it's like, if it's centered on the aircraft carrier and you sink it, yeah, okay, well, what's the lessons learned? Okay, okay, we'll go back this, we'll apply it, AAR, after action review, let's apply all the lessons learned and what happened. Okay, now go back with these lessons learned, reconstitute the aircraft carrier and run the exercise now with these lessons learned. Because what? You sink the aircraft, oh, okay, a one-week exercise is done after 24 hours, everybody can go home. No, like, that's the thing. And I think

people grab these things, and you see that in the reporting, and they over, they grab the wrong aspects of the exercise or they use it as gospel of the Bible rather than saying, hey, in the end of the day, these are made up scenarios because they're designed to meet a training objective. And also, and this might be a little bit of an amateur way of looking at it from the total outside, but you're also getting to some outcomes sometimes that are going to be like the 0.5% scenario. And then it's over-deltered, if you will, is like, oh, this is a 50% scenario because it was so easy, but that's not realistic. And especially in simulations, because there's like where, I think when most people think

of military exercises, like where you're wearing, you know, the. soldiers and like that actually exists. But when you're dealing at large, large scale, generally a lot of these are simulated. I can give a perfect example. We did a military exercise, just a normal one for for our when I was in the MPs. And it was all simulated, right? So it was it was centered on the staff of the unit. So you have your battalion staff, your brigade staff. And it was really centered on that. And so the line units, what we'd call like the companies and like the soldiers, a lot of that had to be simulated, obviously, because we didn't have. So there was a live component and the simulation. You've heard a lot.

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So if you want a site built for the best, now's your shot. Grab yours using the link of my description below before they shut down orders. Well, in the simulation, the adversary was not North Korea, but had a very similar force structure as North Korea. It was one of those made-up countries. I was like, okay, this is North Korea. We all get it, right? Now, in this exercise, what happened was somehow, don't ask me how, they managed to get a regiment, which is about 3,000 soldiers, bypass the front lines. And then that regiment, encountered one of our companies, an MP company, again, all this simulated, they fought, and I kid you not, the MP company, which is a couple hundred soldiers at most, managed to

destroy, 3,000, 3,000, you know, like not North Korean soldiers, but the MP company suffered 50% casualty rate. Okay. Now, for 200 against 3,000, they're 100 left. Now, it's like 300 in the movie. Do you believe for a second that that's real? No. No. Now, it's like, don't fight the game. That's another thing in military. You run with what happened.

And so what the scenario then was built around that because that happened, it was a fluke. Instead of saying, okay, reset, we said, no. We're going to take this as an opportunity to train our staff in a mass casualty event. And now we have a unit that's combat ineffective. So how do we address that as a staff? Combat ineffective, mass casualty event, go. And that's what we did. But I can then, by that logic and everything here,

oh, let me grab that. An MP company can kill an entire North Korean regiment. And I can write a whole article about that. And it's not a lie, but it's just not reality because it's simulation. And that's where the criticism on some of these and how this talk about from an exercise perspective, how those types of narratives, and especially to the media, you can kind of manipulate and really push something that's not real or reality

and how it's done. And some of that is even with Russia, Ukraine, and the Ukraine and the drones, like, yes, There's a lot of important lessons learned to be done, but that's one type of war that does not necessarily how the U.S. or the West is designed to fight, which is much more air dominant-centric. And that's not, and we're a maneuver-centric force. And what we're seeing in Russia, Ukraine, is positional warfare. And those are different things that, although lessons are learned, we shouldn't, like, automatically assume one over the other. Got it. Well, again, because you were, you ended up bouncing up very close to when this really did blow up, no pun intended. Yeah. But like, my first question would be whether it was the people you directly reported to or the things that were coming down the chain of command, like, tone wise over the years that you were specifically looking at Iran as a potential threat, were you sensing it all that there was almost a push to, you know, go find the body so we can have the crime so we can go do this. Again, that's not. I was just a contractor designed for military exercises and we had, you know, we tracked, you know, intelligence to all that. But like that, at the end of the day, that's where. where that's more of a conversation at the National Security Council level, at the White House level. Like that is a way down where we're at. And it's like even even the guys there, we're like,

we're there to protect the soldiers with our equipment, like the Patriot. That is not what's done. But to get to your point, when we, when Trump was, you know, building up the troops in the Middle East, one of the things I was telling people is like, look, I don't know if Trump is going to do it. But if he wanted to do it, if he wants to do it, these are the assets you want in place to do it. Right? So you can't analyze. In the end of the day, it's like any individual. You can't get in somebody's head.

You can't get in Putin's head. You can't get in Putin's head. You can't get in Trump's head. You can't get in Macron's head. You just can't. So you have to look at everything around. And even outside, oh, well, this New York Times report, administration official says X, Y, Z. But NBC says Y, 1, 2, 3.

Okay, that's noise. look at the hard data and what's hard data, military movement, assets being deployed. That's how you start knowing something was different. Sure, sure. Yeah. And again, every administration, elections matter. I mean, that's what I said. You know, I was there during the first Trump administration and then the Biden administration,

and then I left and then you don't, here comes the second administration. If you love it or hate it, that's in the end of the day what happened. But when people kind of were back then, oh, well, he said no new wars in the debate. It's like, this guy killed General Soleimani. Right. Now, you were on duty when that happened. That was January 2020. So I was, funny enough, I was on vacation, and when I saw that, I was like, are you kidding me?

What made you say that? It was General Soleimani. Right. I mean, it's just like, it was just insane. It was like, what? And to the point where I would tell people, it's like, like, I think people forget, like, this all happened because if memory serves me correctly, in 2019, in the end of 2019, there was a problem of pro-Iranian militia groups in Iraq attacking U.S. forces in Iraq. and a contractor, if I'm not mistaken, or an American died in one of these attacks.

So then the U.S. retaliated, killed a bunch of these militia members, and what precipitated before the killing of Soleimani was these militia groups got a bunch of protesters to, quote, like they stormed the U.S. embassy. They never breached it. They never got through, but they kind of went past the initial gate and they kind of stormed it.

And then that ended with, after that, Trump said, okay, we're killing Soleimani. Like, holy shit. Yeah. And then what happened, then Iran responded with the ballistic missile strikes against Al-Assad Air Base in Iraq, right? Where no Americans were killed, but hundreds suffered TBI injuries, right? But, you know, that was to me, I think, you know, a lot of us, I thought a lot of us, me specifically, I thought after Salamani was killed, there was a belief in me that thought, man, Iran is going to, they're going to have to go hard on this response. Like not the, like not the al-Assad.

Yeah, and that's the thing. Then they didn't. They blinked. They did. You know, like you said, they had the one strike. No one died. Yes, there were some casualties, which is never good. But like, that was the top dog. That was like... He was the number two. Yeah, that was like taken out someone extremely high in a country. You would think, like, that would be the time where they'd launch some sort of ballistic missile towards maybe multiple countries and really inflict some pain. And they obviously, they had all the propaganda where like the Ayatollah was crying on air, had all the kids crying behind them. We're going to avenge this. the whole bit, and they didn't, which was part of the reason why fast forwarding, you know, when you make the argument about Iran, it's one of the most annoying conversations I have with anyone because you have to hold multiple thoughts at the same time, right? So, yeah, they don't

like us. Yeah, their regime is bad. Yeah, their regime is tyrannical. They kill their people. These are all horrible things. China kills the Uighurs every day and we're not fucking invading China. You know, unfortunately, you can't just go willy-nilly like, be like, you know what, Fuck it. I think I'll invade somewhere today just because I can. That's not how the world works. And when you're dealing with a nation of 93 million people that has, as you know, a significant weapons arsenal to be able to respond and also inflict damage on other countries that aren't us that are going to be pissed about it who didn't make this decision, that creates a problem. So fast forwarding, though, from 2020 and 2025, before we get to what happened here, when you saw

the 12-day war breakout and the bombing of, you know, places that you weren't covering from an intel perspective, but the bombing of Florida and nuclear sites in Iran. Did you think that that was going to be the end of it? Or were you like, oh, fuck, this is. I, it was very interesting. The fact that it was in Israel-Iran argued fight was very interesting. I mean, obviously, I can't go too much into details, right? Because it's like, you know, that was, it was a very interesting dynamic that in many aspects, I think in our minds and how, if you were to ask me in 2023, let's say, or 24, well, let's not say 2024 because October 7th really changed everything, 22, 2022, 23, right, before October 7th. If there was a scenario where Iran and Israel were kind of going at it

and the U.S. kind of didn't get involved, that would have been very interesting to me because it kind of would have shattered kind of my presumptions and my assumptions and how things would have operated and worked, right? Like, so, but what was interesting is Israel was the one who initiated the attack against Iran. That was a very interesting development. And I think where Iran, Iran was blinking ever since October 7th, 2023. What do you mean blinking?

Because what happened was you enabled Israel to go one by one and pick off the proxies. They managed to get off Hamas. And they managed to significantly weaken Hezbollah. Bashar al-Assad fell. They lost Syria. So that a land bridge that they had to Hezbollah gone. So at some point,

and the Iranians weren't doing anything to respond, right? And when Hamas, I think the worst case scenario that we all envisioned in the Middle East would have been October 7th, but with Hezbo and Iran getting involved in all the proxies, all at once. And I think Sinwar, the former Yanwa Sinwar, who the mastermind of the October 7th, that's what he wanted. Yes. He wanted that to happen because in his idea, was it was going to be enough to overwhelm Israel. And the interesting aspect, though, from a U.S. perspective is we weren't focused on the Middle East in 2020. What?

In 2023, it was Russia, Ukraine with Biden. Well, I know we have a big focus there, but you're saying we weren't focused at all. We were for. The priority wasn't the Middle East. If anything, there was a reduction of force in the Middle East because of what was going to get. So now you can start seeing this idea. Well, wait a minute. Like after October 7th, what did the Biden administration do?

They started to deploy a lot of forces to the Middle East to support it. But I think Yanwas Sen were in his mind, he wanted to work that, like that in his mind, in this very diabolical thought process of this is the moment. Benjamin Nenya, who's weakened politically, there was mass protests in Israel. The United States is consumed because of Russia, Ukraine. They're pulling out forces. We had the access resistance. There's nothing holding us back.

Now is the time. Yeah. And then he launched it. And everybody was like, what are you doing, like, the axis of resistance? And what universe are you thinking to the point where even Hezbo was like, I mean, yeah, we'll do some things in the full way. We're not going to, we're not going to do what you did. And so what happened was Israel then was able to go one by one by one. And I think one of the detrimental facts was the loss of Syria for Iran, Bashar al-Assad falling.

Like that was a serious, that if there's one thing that- Supply routes alone. If you're going to make a history book, let's say the collapse of the axes of resistance, the before and after is the fall of. Bashar al-Assad, right? I mean, that is the whole reason why Iran was so invested in Syria. And so that's why I went, you know, on Tom Garrison in Syria, it's a huge aspect because of, in reality it was, you know, oh, against I said, no, it was like against Iran. You know, that's why it was a huge component. Now going to 2025, when Israel conducted the strike against Iran, it was very interesting that Iran didn't target the U.S. or the Gulf. Hmm. That was very interesting. And it was interesting that Trump decided to bomb, you know, the nuclear facilities

and then use that as an excuse to end the fighting. Right? It's like he, so the only thing I can think of was there a concern in the administration that even though this was Israel, Iran, at some point Iran was going to say, okay, enough is enough. We're going to have to start targeting all these other countries and the U.S. to force them to stop with Israel. Because whatever, you can hear what people say, oh, the Israelis were four, you know, they begged Iran to, no, they, no. No, guys, they didn't. Like, I'm sorry, whatever universe you think of your operating end of. Israel had no necessity to stop.

They had none. They really didn't want to stop. Trump bombed the nuclear plants, the nuclear facilities, and told Benjamin Anahou, you're done. You're out. We're done with this. I don't know if the reason why they did that is because they were concerned that Iran, what we saw now in February, was going to do some significant retaliation to force the Israelis to stop. Because I think people don't, like, the U.S. has a lot.

lot of influence over Israel. I mean, I know people are going to talk, APAC, in Israel, on the U.S. People talk to Israeli nationalists, like, in Israel. Their main criticism is the influence that the U.S. has on Israeli decision-making. I mean, that's just the ultimate projection I've ever heard in my life. That's ridiculous. I mean, eight months, dude, this went from in June 2025, uh, the gun, we bombed all the nuclear capabilities, total victory. It's over to Eight months later, we're putting our boots on the ground and it's our boots going there while they go and ethnically cleanse the fuck out of Lebanon. That's, I'm sorry. That's a one way street where a nation of nine million people is basically telling our fucking president like a little bitch what to do.

I don't understand how, like if they're going to say the nationalists in Israel, oh, the U.S. has too much influence here, in my opinion, that's just because the psycho-nationalists over there actually expect to have 100 percent. influence and they're upset when they only get 99. So what I think people for the 2026, what was very, like, let's look at 2026. And this is what, this is like, why, why 2026? Why February 28, 2026? What was the reason? Because let's not forget what started in 26 was the capture of Nuclos Maduro in Venezuela. Uh-huh.

Who's got a lot of oil. And by the way, still under communist control right now. People forget about that. Well, I would say just taking a step back from Desi Rodriguez perspective, I would say you can talk to a lot of people. Like, it is insane how, yes, in name, socialism and they love it. But in reality, I mean, they're doing what the U.S. tells them to do. I mean, it is like, they tell, they told Desiard Rodriguez stop sending oil to Cuba. Got it.

Stop. Yeah. We're done. No issues. We're going to send our Department of Energy, you know, Secretary of Energy there. We're going to send our executives. We're going to do all this. Like, yep.

the Southcom commander I think is General Donovan went to Caracas less than a month after the capturing the bombing of Caracas and the capturing the Southcom commander the commander responsible for that operation a couple weeks later landed in

Caracas to meet with them yeah I mean right so so now it was funny because going to kind of tying the cartel to Iran the thought process was and you know even me talking to be like dude Mexican cartels are next the cartels are next the cartels next. But I think what people really don't push too much emphasis on is the protest that happened in

Iran. The protests in Iran, for some reason one way or another, fundamentally changed the trajectory of U.S. military might in the Western Hemisphere to focus onto the Middle East. And part of it, here's the thing, though. One of the reasons I hate having to argue about the Iran war is because the idea of even having to slightly steal man radicals who run that country, which is what they are. Let's not get it twisted is so intellectually annoying to me. Yet I get forced to do it because I believe it was in January. Scott Besant, who, you know, is our Treasury Secretary, was running around Davos on camera, bragging about the sanctions he was putting on Iran and bragging about the fact that he was going to take their currency effectively to zero, which it is, which it is. Yep. Which he then said

would force people into the streets and cause protests. And because they know that the regime is crazy, they would kill those people. He, I don't even think in his defense, he mentioned the fact that we were going to try to arm the Kurds, which, you know, went totally ass backwards with that and foment a lot of this. He definitely didn't mention the fact about Mossad's involvement in that operation. That's fine. That's not his world or whatever. But I look at it. I look at the at that and I go, if I see a psycho down the street on the side of the street having a fucking crackhead freak out or something, and I go and load a fucking weapon for him, and I hand it to him and I say, have fun. Yeah. I get charged in court. Yeah, but that's where the difference

between us as individuals and governments, they don't play the same rules as we do. They don't play with the same rules as we do. But when I look at it that way, I cannot like, I'm not going to criticize other governments, whether it's Iran or Israel, and not also criticize my own. Yeah. And what I would say is if you look at the, because you're right, because the currency, the real is worthless. I mean, it is just, and it's continuously to go under freefall. But I would say that the Iranian regime in the Islamic Republic, it also in their mindset, because it can be, I think there can be multiple truths as ones, because right now we're doing this, by the way, at Cuba, right? The blockade against Cuba, the stopping of the oil is to cause the

electricity to go out and then force people on the street and then you, and then we indicted Rao Castro, the former president, right? And it's the same might because it's kind of falling in some ways of Venezuela model. They're doing it in the Cuba model and then Iran. Like this is something that this administration is really doing. And then Iran, I think there's a, there's a, there's a, there's the history of the protests in Iran is very well documented. And the, and the U.S. government's argument is we're not forced to do business with anybody if we can force government. Same with Iran because they pick and choose. What was interesting after though, going to my point when I was saying, when the protests ended, there was, I think we can all remember there was like reports that Trump

might have done like a symbolic he was going to do a strike against Iran. Yes. Because of the protests because he said that true social, no protest killed, et cetera, et cetera. But what did we see then afterwards was a massive deployment of U.S. combat power to the Middle East? At that point, that's what going back, it's like, you can talk to your sources in the cabinet, you can talk about that. It doesn't matter. What are they planning? And that's what I would focus on a military exercise going back to the original thing. It's like, do I build a military exercise where I'm deploying forces?

I have all the forces or I have none of the forces. That's the parameters they're set. So when I saw that, I'm like, is what are going to happen? I don't know. But I can tell you for a fact, the option is there. And if they're going to do it, it's going to be big. And it's not going to be what we saw the Fordo, just the nuclear bombing of the facility

Natanz. No, this is real. It was going to be, if you wanted to do regime change, this is how you're going to do it. And then the U.S. responded. And what's, again, when I get kind of, you know, I got criticized for this a lot. What I would tell people from my own experience, people might not believe me, but I was like, I expected Iran to do a lot more damage and be a lot worse than what I saw. Really? Yeah. Why? Because, again, they had to... Because they did do damage.

They did, but not to the degree that I thought they were going to be, right? So look at the amount of missiles and drones were, like the amount of missiles and drones that were launched and kind of the trajectory. Now, the argument people make as well, they wanted to extend it. They needed that deterrence, which is true. They generally Iranians want to do some of the extended, et cetera, like they had an understanding. But then that shows that there was a significant degradation that they weren't able to sustain large-scale attacks at the beginning. Right. So I think the first couple of days is when Iran had, and I think this is one of you going to military might, right?

What is the goal of the U.S. at this point from a military person? perspective at the beginning of the war is you do the initial strikes against the command and control elements, but the number one priority for the U.S. always going to be destroy the air defense. We want to destroy their air defense so we can enable our fighter just to operate freely over Iran, right? So while we're focusing on that, that's a window of opportunity for Iran to launch their attacks to try to halt our ability to do that. What the Iranians were more focused on doing, though, was yes, they struck some military, they struck military bases and their damages, we knew this because one of the things that happened before the war started,

we evacuated bases, especially the one that closed it. Because again, we knew this is what they're going to do, pull these guys out. Because those military bases were built with the mindset of al-Qaeda, Iraq, the Taliban, not against a country with the largest ballistic missile force there. And you have to take into account they have a threat. So that would- Hold on back on one minute. That's interesting. I never heard someone put it that way before. Those bases are, designed, thinking about al-Qaeda and some of these terror groups and stuff, but not about countries that could have a significant... So, think of it in the sense if you put a lot of these bases, for example, IUD Air Base in Qatar, right? And we still have people there, right? And you're building that. You both that look at the distance between Qatar to Iran. Very short.

Yeah, so far. What is one of the largest arsenals that Iran has in their ballistic missile program? Short-range ballistic missiles. And what's the official range? I would say, so it depends who you ask and all that. Conservative estimate. I'm going to be very careful about a couple hundred miles, and I'm just going to leave it very kind of vaguely in that, just to make sure.

But for example, one of the platforms I would recommend people to look up, for example, the FETA 110 or the FATEH 110 or FATEH 313. Okay. So you can look those up, the Feté 110 or Fet 313. these are Iranian short-range ballistic missiles that have a very, these are very effective, one of the largest that they have in the arsenal, right, short-range ballistic missiles. These were designed in many aspects to target those U.S. military bases. So when, so those military bases, although yes, a lot of that was because of Iran and containment, etc.

The question is there's a thought process is during peacetime and during war. So when war happens, those military bases right there along the coast, I'm not sitting there. They have more ballistic missiles than we have interceptors. Let's make this clear. We know they have more drones. We know this. So the question then is, when you build military installations, it's like the Cold War. This is the argument.

The U.S. military bases in West Berlin, yeah, they were built in the mindset of the Soviet Union for containment and, you know, all this and messaging. But if the Soviets decided to invade West Berlin, was there a fighting chance in hell that those soldiers were going to survive? No. Let's be real. If the Soviet Union ever decided to invade West Berlin, the West Berlin U.S. force is there. We're not going to stop it. And so the thought process in the Middle East is when you're building these bases,

yes, in a containment perspective and they're there from area. But the moment war happens, those just become prime targets. And they become almost like in a way a liability. They become a liability. And they weren't designed in this mindset of how now the U.S. military is going to just like less, where I also go back to like this building of these massive forward operating bases, massive bases, like with the Burger Kings and the, you know, their green beans and all that.

That was a, you know, a G-WAT mindset. Yeah. And now with Russia, Ukraine, China, Taiwan, even with Iran, a lot of that mindset is no, you have to be expeditionary. You still need some of these large-scale bases to project power for air combat, for refueling, supply, logistics. Absolutely. But you're not going to do what we have now, which is all this ring around Iran, of these large infrastructures that you can't do anything with it.

And Iran knows I just need to hit those because then I can go into the information space and say, huh, look, see, I hit you guys. And then there's, oh, my God, how do we not expect? It's like, well, I mean, yes, we did. Why do you think we evacuated soldiers? Yeah. Now, once it did, obviously, you correctly point out when you're deploying all those assets to the Middle East, at the rate they were, forget even just the scale. of course you're planning on doing something and at some point that's going to happen. Nonetheless, the goalposts of what like the goals of the war was supposed to be seemed to constantly move.

Like at the beginning it was like we want a regime change Iran. And I talked to a couple sources a week before the actual invasion or like five days, three to five days before the invasion after John Kyriaku had talked about on here. I talked to a couple other people. And they're like, yeah, there's people that are telling that like Trump believes. based on a couple people that are talking to him, that he could make a regime change within a couple weeks of this place and it would be over and it'd be like the bow tie on his legacy, he'd be the guy that took down the Iranian regime. The reality is you are looking at invading a place that we already laid out has a lot of people. It is geographically very, very protected in many ways. You're now fighting on their territory, which can actually have the opposite effect of some people

who don't even like the regime now being like, you know what, fuck it, we're being attacked. And they also didn't seem to have like a plan for what to do once it started. Like it was constantly like, well, we'll do this. You know what? No. And they didn't even know that the Strait of Hormuz would be basically like held captive, even though there were a lot of intelligence sources saying it would. So first question, were you surprised they're all by the Strait of Hormuz becoming an issue?

No, we planned this on the thing. It was literally like, yeah. Again, but it goes back to Genevoteau. They asked him this question. And he literally answered. And I think it was with the national, the UAE, they asked him, well, how did you not anticipate this? And he kind of looks, what are you talking? Of course we did.

Yeah, we told them. And again, but again, it goes back to my previous perspective. When you're planning stuff, right, how do you execute those plans? And it's, you cannot do an all, like, I want air supremacy. I want the straits of Fremuz Hopen at once. I want to do this. I want to, like, you have, there's phases of operations. and how to do things.

And then that's the thing. So the threats that are existing, right now would be very interesting. For example, Project Freedom gets reannounced. Like this whole, you know, Strait-Refam moves and these naval forces go through. It's also interesting that this diplomatic route. I don't disagree with you. I think the messaging specifically from the top has been all over the place. And I think that's where I think if there's a lesson learned for anybody who wants to continue,

like that's why you have to have discipline in your communications department and how you message to the American people. because it's also what's a war for most of the majority of American people were not expecting or anticipating. Yeah. And so that's also a problem. I wonder why. But going back to, from a military perspective, from Iran, I was still like, I was expecting a lot worse. Flat out, 100%.

Their capabilities were robust. You can look at all they had. The numbers they were launching, some of the military bases that were hit, we knew they were going to hit them. Even the one where they hit the E3 century, you know, the commanding, the AWACs in Saudi Arabia. Yeah, okay. Right. That was a significant hit. But then you hear people making these arguments, well, how did we not do this and this and this and this? Again, goes back to, do you know, before you make this analysis, are you aware of how many military installations, U.S. military forces are able to operate in the Middle East when they're bombing Iran? Do you have, do you know, you won't, but do you know that? Number two, you also have any commander will tell you there's areas where you have to assume risk. Why do commanders exist in the military, from a platoon leader all the way to a co-com commander? They're officers, they're the commander because they're the ones at certain echelon that can assume risk and make a decision with risk in mind. Right. If I'm a S2, I'm an intelligence officer and I tell my battalion commander, hey, sir, if the enemy is here, here, here, if you do this, this could be the con, this is the risk that we're going to see, meaning the S2 and the S3 and we breathe the commander.

The commander is going to look at that and say, can I make this decision myself? or do I have to go to hire to say, hey, I need authorities to make this decision and to assume risk. And I think that gets ignored. And so when you're talking about

the strike of Prince Sotan Air Base that destroyed the AWACs, like, well, why do we have all our forces there? Because the priority was air superiority and air supremacy over Iran. That means you had to concentrate certain amount of forces, refueler capability,

aircraft capability, in certain areas that were going to be a target. So you try to mitigate that risk with air defense. And if you have the ability to maybe harden structures, but you don't have unlimited resources. That's another thing.

Everybody thinks, oh, we can throw everything at once all there. And it's like, again, that's not how reality works. And so, again, I just go back to my, I think how I would say this, look at the 91 Gulf War and compare it to Iran. Saddam Hussein shot down more American aircraft and killed more American airmen and even captured American pilots than Iran did in this war. So if you look at the 91 Gulf War and you look at,

this war, you actually, if anything, you can make the argument you've seen an improvement. The vast majority of U.S. aircraft losses in Iran were drones, MQ9 drones. Because the MQ9 drones was very interesting. I think he was in the Air Force. I don't remember his exact position. He said, yeah, we were using the MQ9s to go over, like, heavily utilized in them for strikes, because in the end of the day, well, they're drones. If they get shot down, we're not risking our pilots. So that's what they kind of like really push that risk. And so that's why they're more likely to get shot down, but that's why they're there. Again, that's why officers in the military existing. Yeah, I want that because in the end of the day, I want to destroy this asset. I'm willing

to assume that risk. So if you look at it, 91 to now, and you look at the combat power losses, Saddam Hussein did better, which shows that the U.S., even with the country with the most advanced ballistic missile program and drone program in the Middle East, did worse than Saddam Hussein. And I think most people can't comprehend that, and they look at the civilian strikes and the Dubai airport and the oil refiners. Iran knows how to do that because they know that's how they're going to get the U.S. to back off. That's their whole point.

You can make the argument the U.S. should never have done that. That's not, and I don't want people to look at this and say, I'm advocating this war. I'm not advocating this war. That's not why I'm afraid. I'm just saying this is, and if the president say go, and I'm an officer, it's like, okay, we go. And then if I'm like right there, I'm like right about to win and I'm like, oh, and then the president or an officer above me says, stop, my stop.

That's the chain of command. And the end of the day is the president. Are we going to go back to war? Maybe, maybe not. Are there's going to be a diplomatic solution? Maybe, maybe not. But that's a separate conversation than here. Well, not to compare apples to ice cream here because they are entirely different scenarios.

That said, when you look at the 28-minute war in Venezuela, which was a brilliantly executed mission, regardless of whether you think they should have gone in there or not, like they executed it perfectly, that relied heavily on artificial intelligence to basically like war planet and then execute it. And, you know, again, totally different. But do you know anything about like what the setup is for, you know, the utilization of AI on the battlefield in Iran and where maybe that's gone wrong in places where they thought it was going to go right? I just, I go back to like from, I mean, I'll get to the AI piece in a second, but it's two different objectives, right? What the U.S. did against Maduro was a very specific capture leader, pull him out. In Iran, it wasn't just the strike that killed Homanie, the Supreme Leader.

Like, it wasn't just a one and done. It was a dedicated campaign of absolute degradation of Iranian military capabilities, the Navy, the Air Force, the ballistic missile force, the production capabilities and the nuclear facilities, and even some of the leadership in ground forces and besiege, like the Israelis did a lot more of that, right? They led a lot more of that aspect. Now, you're getting the reports, are they reconstit, take a step back, be very cautious when you read when you read articles that said leaked intelligence says this. And here's the reason.

But it's not because they're lying. I don't want to, I don't like throwing fake news. I think that's disingenuous and not fair for reporters who are just trying to do their job in the situation they're at. What I would tell people is multiple things. One, did they have access to the full intelligence report or did people tell them? And then when people tell them, the question is, okay, the intelligence report can say this, but there's other things that are very important. For example, what's the mythology?

What's the scope of the intelligence report? So what were they, what were they're trying to analyze? The methods they try to achieve that. The sources they used, and more important, the confidence level. Was it a low, meaning, or high confidence level? That matters. I as an intelligence official could say, let's say you're my commander, sir, we have a single source human's report indicating that there's going to be an IED attack at this location at this time. That's an analysis. But my confidence level, but sir, it's low confidence because it's one person. Now, let's say that person has a five-year history of excellent reporting, 99% success rate in his intention.

Oh, well, maybe I can say, well, maybe I'm going to say a medium based on standards that we have. Or maybe that triggers a high confidence because he's such a reliable source. Now let's say I got a single source report and then I have intercepts of community. that's, again, that's the confidence level. And I think that's why a lot of times the news organization, and you might then see the CENTCOM commander when they grill him in an open, you know, Congressman plays against like,

you're a congressman, you know what you're doing. You can go to it behind the scenes, you know what's going on, they brief you, you have a skiff, okay? Like some of these is like, I got it, but it's all political. You know, got it, you know, but in a class, and you see the general there and he's like, or the Admiral's like, I can't say this here, you know I can't. He just said, well, I disagree and we'll talk about that

behind a classified setting. But that's where you kind of have these disagreements that kind of go on because I think some of that the media doesn't necessarily capture either because they don't want to, they think it overcomplicates or they don't understand. And one of those is, for example, like the CIA, we can go to this later, the CNN report of the, like the CIA assassination against cartel members in Mexico. I don't know if you saw that. From CNN.

CNN reported, and then New York Times subsequently later, but differently said that there was plans that the CIA ground branch had plans to kind of conduct assassinations inside of Mexico against cartel members. Not an intelligence report. They assassinate them and they work with them. So I think some of these, again, issues. But yeah, that's what I would say. So you have because now the conversation when the military strikes happened against Iran, it was very different than Venezuela.

Yeah, that's the one. I have issues with this report. We can go into, but. Yeah, but let's break it down since we're on it. So what this was from May 12. 12, 2026. So this is a good real-life example. What were the things that stood out to you here?

It says, by the way, I just want to read the headline. CISCLAID, Secret War on cartels with deadly operations inside Mexico. Yeah. So number one, okay, so that video is from a car that was driving this. That happened near Mexico City and recorded the back end of that explosion. And so in that car, I remember seeing this. And like when it first came out, it was like, the guy who they killed his name is It's being.

It's being. P-I-Y-I-N-E-N-E-B-G-G-G-E. And you can actually probably find the video of that, like, of that explosion where they killed them. I don't know if you're going to get flagged for doing that. But that, that's like... We just won't put it on the screen. But you can, yeah. But, I mean, it's like all over X Twitter or social media.

Like, it's easily found. Yeah, let's watch that in here. So, first of all, so he, so he, like, he wasn't like, I mean, you can make the argument. Maybe he was mid-level. And, I mean, that's kind of like a stretch in many ass, but like, oh, Okay, I didn't even know who he was until after the fact. And the only reason why I knew who he was is because later accounts identified him working for another guy whose alias is 4.1, 4 by 1, right? Or El Mennium.

He's basically, he's a lieutenant, a top lieutenant of the Maito Flakos in Senaloa. Okay. The area where that guy is based out of, last year, there was a major drug bust there where they seized multiple meth labs that were producing like tons of methamphetamies. like an excessive amount of methamphetamines. So that's the one. I mean, I think you should be fine. Yeah, well, we'll leave it off there just in case YouTube's been really tough.

But that, yeah, that's the one. And so the argument is they put the explosive devices in the car and it detonated and killed them. And so when it first happened... It was the whole firework? When it first happened, we were all like, was this? I mean, we all assumed it was it had to be those chapitos. Right.

Right. Like, those are the only ones. And then CNN just came out and said, oh, no, it was actually the U.S. CIA. And it was like, okay, why would the – and then subsequently after that, there's a New York Times report that said, well, it wasn't a CIA unilateral operation done by ground branch. It was a CIA coordinated operation with the Mexicans and the Mexican intelligence were the one who killed. Well, I don't even think they identified who was the one who did it, but they just said the Mexicans did it. It's just the CIA gave the intelligence. Okay.

Still, why? The only logical explanation I can think of is you want to cause mass paranoia within the organization. So you start doing assassinations. They're thinking there's somebody inside or there's somebody with my rivals working and they managed to penetrate my organization. They're killing my guys off. So now you cause mass paranoia and mass confusion. And then that causes tensions within the organization.

I talked to sources from this. They said this bullshit. Like they don't believe it at all. and then... What kind of sources are you talking with for that? Without revealing there. I would just say... Let me answer this.

If this were true, if this were true, you would have seen the Mexican government run like wild on this story. Because before this... I agree. Before this, two CIA officers died in a car

accident in Chihuahua. And the Mexican president, by the way, lied through her fucking teeth saying, oh, we didn't know. Right? So these officers, what happened was they helped the Chihuahua State Police do a drug raid that seized a couple of drug labs in Chihuahua, right? I think it was Luis Chapparo then said that the reason why the CIA was involved because they had the tech to help find these drug labs. Okay.

But then the federal government, we didn't know CIA was operating in Chihuahua with the Chihuahua State Police. Okay, the CIA is not risking an extensive, extensive intelligence cooperation and agreement between the U.S. and Mexico because of a drug lab. Sorry to the people, no, they're not going to do that. Two, if they're working with the Chihuahua State Police, the federal government is going to be made aware of that, and if anything, are also actively cooperating. But why did Clydea Shinebaum say, oh, we weren't aware? The governor of Chihuahua belongs to a rival political party. That then she can use as a political party. weapon against her for upcoming elections.

Because it's not Morena political party, right? So that's why she said that. And my argument is, by the way, the head of security for Mexico, like what would be equivalent to the Department of Homeland Security for Mexico, or his name is Omar Harfuch, he is very well-liked in the U.S. I mean, extremely well-liked. Bipartisan support, gets a lot of praises. is he went on Newsmax, very interestingly,

to do his interview with the U.S. media. Newsmax, you know why. He wanted to get into, you know, he wants to get into the conservative in the Trump's year. Omar Khartofuts is a very powerful figure within Mexico and has been a lot to coordinate with the United States.

There's no universe where the CIA would have done an operation in Mexico against, you know, unilaterally in Chihuahua. It just doesn't make any sense. It just doesn't. So then using that as an example, you're telling me that the CNN drops as a couple of weeks later,

or not even a couple of weeks, like a week later, that their union. What did the Mexican government say? Omar Harfuge, shortly after this article was published, blasted CNN's reporting, said this is fundamentally false. And then when the New York Times reported, well, it was the U.S. intelligence support, but it was done by the Mexicans. Klaudey Schaimbaum, literally on her morning press briefing said, oh, this is fantasy land. No, the Mexicans didn't kill it. Like they fund, it was a universal condemnation of the,

not of the U.S. actions, but of the reporting. And so that's why I have a lot of doubts on this report. And because, again, El Pijin, I mean, he was, maybe, you know, that he was 4'1, which is Maito Flaco, and there were some drug labs last year, but, like, you know, it's just, it's not a major figure. If you were told me, for example, El Panu, so let me backtrack.

This all had, there was a string of very interesting assassinations that happened in 2025, early 2026, with this one kind of being the one. But in December 2020, There was two assassinations that really picked my interest that were specifically against those chapitos, the rivals of the Maito. It was El Panu, who was the head of security.

It was El Panu head of security. And then a guy named Alchemist. The alchemist. The alchemist. Yes. So he was killed in Kuliacan. He was suspected to be involved in a lot of the drug labs, like manufacturing all that.

There was two assassinations. But the big one was El Panu. El Panu was the head of security. He took over after El Perris. El Perris was ahead of security because he took after El Nini. So El Perris was killed by Mexican special forces. El Nini was captured by Mexico and special forces.

So the head of security of Los Apitos continues to go down. Killed, I mean, captured, killed. And then El Panu, he was in Mexico City and just randomly assassinated in Mexico City. How did they still have power? They've been in this whole like civil war. Their leader's been gone now for a while. the sons have had all the problems and have been extradited to the U.S.

and now, like, you have the Mexican government continually taking out their head of security. Like, how are they still functioning? You know, it's funny. I literally yesterday was on, with Canarina, her dispatch on Ironclad. We literally had the whole episode talking about this. Well, let's do it. Yeah. Continue.

Do you know? I would say, I think, I think don't, it's very interesting to your point, like how, right? Let's say, again, like we did with Iran, let's go back in time. When I started my account, let's say it's 2023. Allegedly. Yeah, you could look at my social Twitter. You were like Kevin Durant. You had that partners, boy.

You were sitting back there and tell like, yes, sir. Yo, you ain't going to bleed this shit Twitter. So let's say it's, it's 2023, and you would have told me that in 2026, Maya Zambada would have been captured by the U.S. is in U.S. federal custody. El Mensho was killed. El Cardinado was captured. I miss him.

He was awesome. And the only one remaining out of those guys is Yvonne fucking Archivaldo. I'm like, you're out of your goddamn mind. If anything, Ivan Yer Chivala, I would have, if Polly Market was a thing, I would have been if Garnad Javado was gone. Putting aside El Mancho, or not El Mancho. Oh, Mayo for a second, because there's a reason I want to put it aside specifically. Why were the other ones so, so surprising?

I agree they're definitely surprising in any scenario in 2023, but like they do have huge targets on their back. Right, but they were also, I mean, but there is a kind of a fundamental shift in this aspect of this conversation was this idea that they were viewed as untouchable. Maybe not a cardiner. Maybe not a cardinal, but at menschel? Yeah. I mean, we saw why. I have my own theories about that, by the way, about the old man show. Yeah, I don't, I think there's a little fuckery in that in a good way, in a different way.

In a good way. And I think that, oh, this is fun. Let me, let me get to the Yvonne proud. And I'll promise I'll jump into that. I just want to know what they did to my man ill hard and narrow. Well, they captured, which was very interesting about a cardinalia. There was no narco blockades. What do you mean?

Okay, so generally when they capture cartel leader, what do you see? Like in a mentor, right? What happened? Mexico goes to shit. Right. But not necessarily a retaliation, but like they try to stop it. So how do they stop it? They like do the narco blockades.

They burn businesses. They shoot pieces up, right? Like they did that with the culliacanasos. Oviedo guzman twice. You see every time. Oh, there's narco, because they get somebody. The fact that that Cardinero got captured and there was like there was no narco blockades, no burning of vehicles, nothing. It was just like, Omar Hartfuts came out, yeah, we got a cardinero.

Sounds a little weird. What the fuck? Yeah, what's happening there? Like they must have, and from the report, like, no, his security. tried to get him out, but like nothing, so what, he wasn't able to communicate, did they find a way to cut him off communication-wise? And he wasn't able to communicate with anybody to do that. And so by the time they announced it, it's too late. Right, because again, outside of El-Menschel, this is an important data point when we're talking about narco-blockades.

Outside of El-Menschel, people think, oh, they do this for retaliation. And it's not necessarily true. The reason why they do narco-blockades is not to retaliate, except El-Menschel, it's to stop the person from being captured, or if he manages to get captured, forced the Mexican government to release them because of the violence. But if that target then gets captured and then gets sent over to Mexico City, at that point, it makes no sense to continue the narco blockades. Because now what they're going to try to do is go through the courts to either get his case thrown out or at least stop any extradition to the U.S. By a judge.

Or, yeah. And we've seen that happen. We've seen that happen all the time. Seems a well of a judge heads off too. And so that is when they do it, right? So the fact that Haredinian, there was no narco bucket is very, very, very, very interesting. But I don't know if it's one of those situations, maybe we're reading too much into it. And there's just information we're like, maybe they cut off his communications or it was really he was caught by surprise. There might be other detail. But that was like, Omar Khartfutjus announced it.

Whoa. Now, he could have just announced it to also say, oh, see, cartel members too late. You can't do anything. We already got him. So don't do the narco block case because it makes no sense. Right. But again, but going back to Ivan Achevalo, though, I mean, it's to your point. Like, who does he have left?

Let's look at the factions, right? For example, the yucos, one of the key factions of Los Chapitos. Can we pull up, Ivan? But yeah, go ahead. So, like, for example, you look, there's a term for all the Chapitos who switch side to the Mayos. They're called those Voltaidos. Los Corteados. Voltaados.

Voltaados. Yeah, the Volttaos. Like the turnover? No, no, like the guys who are the betrayers in a way, the guys who switch sides, who switch teams. Rats. Right? So that's how those Chapitos call them. They say, we're fighting against Chapo Isidro,

which is not, not to be confused with Chapo. Chapu Isidro is the Mesaflores organization, the Guazawa Cartel, former BLO. We're fighting against Los Mayos, Mahito Flaco now. Wait, BLO? Yeah, so the Betran Levine organization, it used to be part of the Sinoloa cartel.

Got it. And then they split off huge violence. I was like, well, you know. And then so he was kind of one of the last, not last, but he's one of the more powerful ones of former BLO. and people Al Archibaldah I'm sorry

the like if you look at how the Treasury Department or the Justice Department they call like guys who are BLOs they say oh a Sinolaa Kartuk is like no that's not true they're not

but you know they don't it's the Justice Department they don't give a shit they're gonna be like well he was once Sinola always Sinola they're all Mexican but yeah that's Ivan Nizava though right oh he looks like a fucking bond villain

so what's very interesting about Ivan though I think people underresting him a lot, right? Yeah. But I would say, so Los Chapitos, right, there's four remaining. Right, there was four originally.

I'm sorry, there was four originally. So Ivan Achibaldo and Jesus Alfredo, there are two that are out, and then you have Ovido Guzman and Joaquin Guzman. And those are the sons. Those are the sons that are in the U.S. And Ivan Al-Chival and Jesus are further the ones that are here.

Okay. Ivan and Chivaldo is the undisputed leader of Los Chapitos. And the thing is, and I told this in Canarina show is like, he has absolute loyalty with his members. Like, if you look at Chapito propaganda and social media pages and messaging pages, they love this man to death.

Why? I think he became the heir of El Chapo. And El Chapo had this gravitas, right? This image that, interestingly enough, Ivan was able to capture that. Very powerful. Aura. Right, exactly. You know who doesn't have it, though?

Jesus Alfredo. I don't know if you can look up Jesus Alfredo. So it's Jesus Alfred the same, Guzman Salazar. Jesus Alfredo is like the least charismatic human being I've ever, uh, no, it's so it's not, it's the, it's, yeah, the one with that picture, the white, that's like his light is more accurate, that's it. That's that's, that's, that guy don't have Riz? No, no, no, man, like, how do you become a fucking drug lord if you don't have Riz? I find it more likely that this man is going to defect to the U.S. and never take over those chapitos. It's going to defect to the U.S. in, what was the second part of that? Then take over the shoppitos.

Okay, I thought you said, so. Well, it's very interesting because now there's a lot of reporting that Ivan Havanaugh's in negotiations with the U.S. to turn himself in. Oh, that's interesting. That's very interesting. Because they already got a lot of the chapposts in custody. Look at the factions. Like, the only key, like, if you look like, okay, they have, I'm just going to throw an antidote, like, Los Cascos. Okay, sure, they're very small, kind of, like, all right, but not me.

The biggest one they have maybe left is a group, a guy named René 00-0-0. Dude, that guy. That's a hard name. René. R-E-N-E-0. Bad guy, great name. So that dude is like, I don't know how many times he switched sides. He's like the least reliable person.

You can imagine, you know, like the whole mafia honor. Like, that guy doesn't believe in the- He's Michael Cohen. He doesn't, perfect, perfect. That is the example I was looking for. The amount of videos that the Chapito social media pages release on fighters belonging to René-0-0-0, fighting in Mexico in Sinaloa

they're like, okay, so that's all you guys have left, them and those cascos. But the cascos are very interesting. And then under the cascos, I think they're called Forces Speciales Ochentai. So the 81st Special Forces. I think that's their full name.

What is this? Oh, okay, no, no. Put like the actual number, like zero, like zero, number. Got it. So zero zero. Yeah, and let's see.

And you want it on Twitter? Yeah, so for example. What's the chicken? Okay, so that, Is that Los Poyos Locos? No, that's El Gallo, the C.J.N.G. symbol. Oh, shit. So, okay, so the pizza Los Chapitos chapitza.

So they're pizza. Uh-huh. And then they had that. So that is an image. Can we show that? Is that going to get us? No, I don't think so. I mean, I mean, there's a car on fire. A little bit of fire.

Come on. They got fire in Pakistan. So that, that image is an AI-generated image that shortly, when there was rumors before, the CG&G Chapito Alliance was officially announced, you started to see some narco message and some social media channels reporting that there was an alliance. That was the one that they, you know, AI generated. They probably went to chat GPT's like, give me a rooster with the fucking pizza. And then that's what they called it. Fourthas special is Union, F, EU. And that's the

image that they use. So within that, it's Chapito CG and G and in those chapitos really right now, it's like the main one of René, which is these guys. These are the guys, right? Like, That's them shooting it up, right? Nice. But it's like, I mean, I would have to look at the exact comment, but I'm pretty certain that's like the one. But it's like, really? That's your guy?

The guy who switched side 50 million times? That's who you're reliance on? And what's actually very interesting. Last week, there were rumors. I've talked to some other cartel observer accounts really reliable that are like adamant. Like, no, no, no. René entered into his ceasefire with those mayos.

Because he was fighting a lot in southern Sinaloa. And that he entered into his ceasefire with Lomai as well. What's interesting of that, if that's the case, the Mayo's didn't enter into a ceasefire with all of Chappito or all of Sinaloa, just with him. So although René is still Chapito, he's not going to go above. If this ceasefire is true, he's kind of been like, all right, Ivan, you're going to have to fight them on the north on your own.

I'm done fighting. Right? And so again, it goes back to who does Ivan have left, and that's a problem. And I think that's why the reporting that he's considering turning himself in is gaining traction. I think the Los Angeles time also reported on that, which is very interesting. Which, again, wouldn't be surprising. I can tell you right now, Ivan has been almost captured so many times. He's like his father.

He's really good at escaping. Very, very effective. But going back to your question about what, he was in easy. He was like a low, of all the leaders, he was like the low-hanging fruit compared to enmeso and compared to en Mayo. Now, in Maya, you're right, was a unilateral U.S. operation. So you can't. Yeah. But El Mensho, it was done by the Mexicans.

Let me get this clear. But there was a very interesting report from Reforma that indicated that Krali Shambam was not informed about the operation to get El Mensche until it was well underway. Kept her in the dark. And I believe it. Why do you believe that one? Because I think there, I think the, I think the, I think the, how these agot operations generally work is, it's, do not underestimate or undervalue, underappreciate. the power that the U.S. have and what is called vetted units in Mexico. Vetted units.

So basically, let's say, like, there's a great Reuters report, actually, that lays it out from the CIA vetted unit in Mexico, right? That they, it's great. Read it. It's phenomenal. And basically, once you read that, what you understand is, so, like, say the CIA, the military, FBI, D, E, HSI. Actually, if you look at HSI's, like, Twitter handle, you put, like, vetted unit in search.

They'll say, Mexico sees this, this, this is, and it's through a vetted unit. Like they will, they like throw that all the time. How these vetted units work is they're basically, you know, vetted by the U.S., trained, equipped, paid all the, actually this is the one, right? Oh, the pernicious propaganda, by the way, great account, follow them, love them. Wait, I haven't seen that one before. So these are, remember when I said Oson?

Yeah. He, they are an Oson account. They are. You know this guy? We told, well, it's actually three. Oh, it's three. Three. Do you know them personally?

No. Most of the people in cartel land, I don't know personally. We all chat regularly, but no. You guys got to do like a cartel meetup or something. Actually, we've had had him on our podcast. One of the team members, Joe from Pernicious Propgant has joined our podcast, our choice. Is he located down there? No, no, no, no, I don't believe so.

I don't know. But if you like, sorry, just quickly, like the vetted units, like that's the thing that I was trying to focus on. But when I was going to Ocent, the reason why he's like a true belief Ose because he does geo-loat. I hate doing geolocation. but like he does like actual like here's a video so I'm going to geolocate this. Oh, using the background. And all that. And so then I'm a manager of geoconfirmed cartel map.

So nine. Confirm confirmed cartel map. Yeah. So geo-confirmed is another great ocean tool where it's like they have all the geolocation. So Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Israel, Syria, you name it. There's a cartel one. And so you can, they have all these videos and images where if it's geolocatable and you geolocated with evidence, they have it on a map with the date and everything.

And so you can kind of. Oh, that's. That's cool. So, Dief, this is basically like, this is like our monitoring the situation. And he's the one creating the situation. So go to Cartel. Scroll. So on the left side, you see where it says Cartel Map? Yeah. Scroll down. I think you went up. There I go. Click on Cartel Map. And now on, okay, so on the bottom, you see the bar. I haven't updated it.

Sorry, Geo confirmed. I'm really sorry. I will update it soon. Grabbed the left purple and go all the way, all the way, all the way, all the way, all the way. And now zoom out. What the fuck? So this is, so these are all the events and they're color coded based on the cartels or the government. This is you doing this. No, I'm, no, no, no, pernicious propaganda does 99%. Does it on this. Yeah, I'm just the guy says approved and I just added into the system like that.

Looks good. Good guys. Added. So like absolutely godlike work. Let me show you another one about OSENT on, if I may. I'm going to give you the account. Do whatever you want. Let me do this.

So let me give you another. one. So the other account, look up, H-E-A-R-S-T. You know what the best part? I was... The BB, the third one. That one. Okay. Wait, is this another one that... Another great cartel account. The inputs to this? No, no. She does bios that are insane. Like, she... Just scroll down. I'm not even, like, scroll down, like that, like that. Oh, this is... Bro, this is where I need in my life because this is actually the funny part about doing the cartel content.

Because it's always like Spanish words and other stuff, every time I have in one of you guys after like two, three months, I'm like, I'm a blank slate again. Wait, which one is which? You know, this whole fucking... So she does Spanish in English. She does Spanish. She, her website, she actually has a website.

It's on her link. Like, go, if you want to go back, go to her... It's a narco chronicles. And click on one of these guys. Oh, she's got like the flow chart. Yeah. So one of her, I love one of her flowcharts from October.

She has all of Sinaloa and all the Chapitos and Mayo's Plaza bosses, identify. She actually, she got DCMA by an account who was trying to take. You know she's influential because bullshit accounts in Mexico were trying to DCMA her work and saying she didn't have, because she, they were like, oh, she didn't have copyright. Copyright for what? For her work. To put up a criminal biography? On Twitter, on Twitter.

because it would, so Twitter, Twitter would take her down all the time. So, oh, yeah. Put up a biography of a criminal. The images, these images, you see the black and that? You see that, that's, and that's her fucking form. If anybody sees that, that's her format. She deserves the credit. And people steal it like motherfuckers.

That's crazy. So she's another great account. So pernicious propaganda, geo-confirmed cartel. Are we following these accounts, Steve? I want to make sure we have this. And then, so in general, Borderland B, is a phenomenal news organization. I know a lot of the reporters.

No, just Borterland Beach. Just not General, sorry. Borderland Beat. I hope they, Borrelan beat. Yeah. These guys are like really great reporters. I talked to a lot of them. So like, Waso, Sol, Prendido, Itzel, Ivan.

So AIC-O-3, that's another one that's a phenomenal one. There's another one that's, oh my God, I'm like, hold on, give me a second. Cruz. Cruz is another great one. He has a great telegram channel as well with a lot of sources and information. Cruz is really good. This is huge because this is actually a huge problem with this space because it's so dangerous down there and because obviously. Look this one up and I'm going to show you why.

So pull it up and I'm going to put, you got to click on this map. Right. But because like they're so wild, wild west to the wild west and the fifth degree down there, finding people who actually know what the fuck is going on is so difficult. So this is great. Okay, so click on the Google Map link. I scroll, yeah. So now do me a favor, go on the left and just click the crimes to the third one,

like unclipped that. And now zoom in. So this is the most accurate cartel territory control map you will ever find. What makes it so accurate? Because this guy, so you remember what the geo confirmed I showed you? Yeah. And then he talks to other accounts and people. And then based on all that, he literally goes into Google Map and updates his regular saying, where's the territories that they control?

So the colors are all different cartel territorial controls. So, for example, that red is CJ and G. That right there is CG and then the lines did not, like all the alliances and conflicts that they have. Whoa. So you can like, so you can, so for example, go to when we were talking about René. So funny. So you know how I found, so I found him. I kid you not on Reddit.

He's like, hey, I'm making this. What do you guys think? Dude, I was just like, what in the... Dude, you're amazing. I need you on X. Like, now, please, please come to X. I am begging you, and I will retweet the shit out of you and endorse you. Because, do you know how hard this is?

Like, he goes in based on pernicious propaganda, geo-conference. The other one who does a lot of great work is Halipon. Halipon is another great... Like J-A-L? No, H-A-L-I-P-P- and I think it's a zero-n, Halipon. He also does a lot of geo-confirmed and geolocation as well. But then they go there and then they update all this and then if you click, you can click on any of these

and they'll show you like the different factions within and the region. Like they... God damn. So like, see, all there in the left? Look what a mess Guadalajara is. Oh my God. So like, like, so when I first created my account, if you were to ask me what my end,

goal was, was that, like, a lot of these things you're seeing now. I wanted a geo-confirmed cartel map. Somebody who had a live map like this, you know, Hurst just been kicking out as way before I existed, and she does an amazing, like, and it's like, and it's now, it's like, okay, we got to get them the, the, what they deserve, like, the credit they deserve, because I know for a fact, that's a gottypone, another great cartel account. Cruz is another one, A, Y, I say, like, there's so many that, like, that they do so much great work. And these are just, a lot of them are more kind of like, and a lot of them are bilingual. Obviously, English is Spanish,

but a lot of these are more kind of the English things. But, like, that's what he does, right? Like, pernicious propaganda was talking about the geo-confirming location. Oh, yeah, look, he's got the funeral of guys who were in the fucking El Meno raid. So, like, that's kind of the network, right? It's like, okay, let's find the videos. Let's post them. Then people then they'll go, okay, let's geo-confirm it.

And my brother can update his map. You know, Hirst can be like, okay, who's who in the zoo? and who's the new leaders and who's, and that's just, and again, we don't get paid to do this. Right. None of them do. I wish they would. But you know what?

Hey, Elon, let's pay the guys that freaking, say, trans people are going to do mass shootings 24-7 or like a bullshit. Oh, let me have my camera and do this for a second and say I'm a reporter because of that. And you're going to tell me the knowledge that you get from this and they get no credit. And people steal their shit all the time. And even sometimes news organizations. Some of them have standards and integrity. Others don't.

They just straight up... A news organization without standards and integrity? Some of them do. That's not... I'm offended it. Some of them do. Come on. I know that there's other accounts.

For example, I do a lot of the... I actually have a lot of the military aircraft observers, like the true ones. I've been doing it for decades. There's a lot of great military aircraft observer. And they're key because they track Mexican flights, U.S. flights, South America. And what's good about that... is they know what normal is and what is it. Because I can grab one image of a on flight radar,

show it to you and you'd be like, oh my God, we're going to bomb Iran tomorrow, bomb Mexico tomorrow because of this one thing. It's like, no, that actually, that one thing has happened 200 times already. Like, that's normal. And that's why, and that's where I think the OScent, now I think people can understand my passion for OSENT.

Because it's that. It's insane. It's an insane amount of work and dedication that people take time out of their days to do for no monetary benefit whatsoever rather than just inform the people. Because then based on that, I can tell you like René Zero Zero in southern Sinoloa, that he's stopped. Now Chapitos have problems in the north.

And so now he has to rely more on those guanos, which is the brother of El Chapo, who's fighting Chapuicero, one of the faction called the Musico under Chapu Isidro, right? Can we pull up the Chapo's current war on that map? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So go... That's actually really helpful. I mean, if you want... I mean, I can...

I don't know if I can stand up there and is there an ability? Yeah, so we have camera five. What would be best just because we might be doing this a while would be like if you really got to point something out, go up there real quick and then come back. But the best is like, let's just direct where it is and Dief will be able to direct people.

So let's zoom out. Okay. And by the way, this is what I do. Like, I've had so many of these, like, the reason why I love to him is like, you know how easy? I have like a small YouTube channel. 8,000, but I just-down below.

And all I do is I get his map, and then I talk about people, like, this is what it means. So you, because that's, what else do I need? What else do you need? What else do you need? This is insane. So go on.

I wonder if someone like it laying, well, I mean, they're in on it, but you know, somewhere else that actually wants to stop the cartels, they're just like looking at this. Like, why don't we have jobs? So, so I, you know what's the beauty of OScent, though? Here's the beauty, because I'm somebody who's been in the Intel, right? I've been on both sides.

Let's say, this is, I got a, it's frustrating. me to shit, specifically I ran. Hey, guys, here's this amazing intelligence report that lays out everything and all the answers and everything we needed. And I look at the classification as top secret, SI, gamma, no foreign FISA. And I'm like, all right, so how many people

in our organization have access to this? 10. Okay, so what the fuck? What am I going to do with this? Right. Who, like, okay, I can tell the general. And then, you know, it's like, what are we doing? But what I like about OSCE, it's unclassified.

I can share this to everybody in the world. Like that's the thing where people like, why does OSOM matter? Because that's the way anybody can just grab this right now and just share it. Well, this is where it's such a brave new world. And I'd love to be a fly on the wall in some of these like top secret rooms in governments where they're like, where I'm sure this stuff runs into interference with what they may want to do with things. It's like people out there in their bedroom can get things that were unfathomable even 15 years ago. And that goes back to AI. That's why we create it because, do you know how much data gets pushed on a daily basis?

It's literally like, that's why, what is AI great at? Aggregation of large data sets. Right. And analyzing it, like, we have our app sitrap for everybody. And it's like, that's why we have it because we're collecting from thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of data points constantly in alerts get published. And it's all AI summary. You have the title, a summary, who, when, where, why, a historical context,

and analysis all the time, boom, boom, because that's the future. Like, as the internet continues to grow, there's going to always be more information than you're able to, like, properly analyze. Yeah, it's noise. Especially for humans. Exactly. Oh, my God. But here's the, here's an issue.

I always do not, do not ignore the noise. The noise is important, too. Oh, no, no. That's not what I meant. I meant there's so many important things happening at once that the attention can be directed wherever they want it to be. That's what I mean. And you know what's in the cartel landscape, I told this,

because I've been on conferences and stuff like then I said this conversation, I tell them, how do I know if this one report is true? It's hard. You know what I mean? It's like, oh, okay. Even if I validated the source, I talked to sources, some of them are cartel members, some of them are people who live in the area, some are people who have access. Right.

Now you're going into, is it a first, firsthand source, second hand source, or third hand source? standard human, anybody who's done human understand those terminology. And then source validation. But then there's another thing, which is what kind of an osint in a large scale, it's the aggregate. What's, okay, is it one or two or is it dozens and a hundred that are all saying kind of an aggregate thing? And that's when you can have a better understanding, okay, who's winning or losing or what's going on in a situation, you know? But to your map, to go there, so you see the yellow, that yellow, pure yellow. Yep.

Okay, so you can scroll in on there. Okay, so this is Sinolawa, right? So what's very interesting is this guy, this is the Chapo Isidro, right? Again, not to be confused with El Chapo, although, but Guasave cartelma as a florist organization. He has an alliance with Los Mayos, the Maito Flaco. Right. And so he's doing a lot of fighting in northern Senaloa. So I'm just going to stand up to point.

Sorry, one second. You're again. Right here specifically this, right? So right here. All right, so that. So that is El Chapo's brother. That's him? That's the brother, yes. He looks like him.

He's also very good at it. I don't know what it is in the Chapo family that they're very good at escaping. Like they got that locked down. Like, so. He doesn't look like he's fast. No, he's not. But so Chapo Isidro, who has an alliance with Mamios,

he isn't engaged in a very heavy battle right now for that region. which is highlighted was a Chantelgwan. How big is that region? Very small. I mean, actually, so what's very key, you see that cluster of little emojis and symbols down there? On the left.

No, no, no, on the, yeah, that one, that one right there. That's Badir Aguato, Sinoloa. You know why Badri Aguato is important? No. El Chapa was born there. The El Chapa, the one in the guy who found this is... So this is like the Corlioni. This is their hometown.

Yeah. So can you imagine if Chappu Isidro managed to seize the time, town where by the baridaguato where el chapa was born which there's a lot of indications he might already be there but the psychological blow for the cartoon oh yeah you know what i mean actually it's funny because in the other town is called latuna in sinola la tuna latuna like tuna like the fish yeah yeah yeah so latuna sinaloa is actually there's a mansion that used to belong to el chapo's mother so ivan's grandmother that has already been kind of like we've seen videos of choppy's cedar members already like in the mansion. They actually before drop bombs using drones, they'd like drop

explosive devices on that. Yeah. She's dead. She's dead. But it was this, it's the symbol, right? The symbology of it. They don't discount the power of propaganda and symbology in cartel landscape. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's everything. So, so Chapu Isidro, one of his key faction he has is called del Musico. They're finding Gentelguano and when a Gentelguano's key allies is called Los Calabathas. They actually use the pumpkin, like the Halloween pumpkin emoji. Calabasas, pumpkin, so that's the emoji they use. Calabas used to belong to Chapo Cedron, and then they broke out. So within the Sinaloa cartels of a war, this is kind of one of the main battles that's going on, right?

Because we all talk about the Mayos and Los Chapitos. This is another one that I think gets ignored a lot. And it's actually very, very key important in what's going on. So the purple is Mayo, the Mayos. And then kind of like, if you zoom out, it's kind of the same color, but like that over in Culiacan, like a little bit south, that like cyan blue right there, yeah. So that's Chapitos, right? And you can see they have the Chapitos right there.

And then you zoom out. And on the southern part, that's what I'm talking about, sorry, in the south. This is René. René's right. Can we zoom out a little more? So the Mayos have a significantly larger region, but that's a lot of mountainous rolling hills and stuff,

whereas it seems like the Chapitos being towards the shore are more urban areas. Correct. That's, yeah. Anyway, but even in some of the areas, so in the south, like Matazlan, like, there's still mountainous area, because if you keep on going down, if you keep on going south, now this is Nayarit, this is a Scaluskin, the Generation Cartel, this is his cardinero's, that right there in Nayarit, and that's Cardinero's territory.

It was. Right. Yeah. That was his territory. But that's why when the alliance was announced, El Cardinado was one of the key members who sent fighters there, and it was suspected that Ivan and Cardinner already had a long-term, like a long personal relationship before the alliance was announced. And that within the CG-NG construct,

Hardinero was the conduit for Los Chapitos. And then through the Cardinero is how El Mento agreed on the alliance. Because specifically to go after, as you show, the Mayos. Now, in the purple, the, within this, you have, in Durango, you see there, Durango, they're loyal to the Mayos, but the cartel there, you know, you can call them the Mayos, but it's really Los Cabreras, Los Cabreras. and they're like they have an absolute control, near absolute control of Durango.

The irony of the situation, or really not, Durango is considered one of the safest states in Mexico. But the reason why is because there's one cartel that controls it. Devil you know. Right. So even the Mexican government and the Durango government, like, how much do we really want to go after the Durango? Right.

So, but why is Sinola one of the most violent states? Because now you have multiple cartels battling each other out. Because you took out the leadership. And this is the age-old question. It's a question with organized crime. It's a question with government leadership. And maybe those are the same thing. But, you know, you cut the head off the snake.

Does it grow 10 heads or is the snake dead? That's so that's kind of the, so that, you know, the kingpink strategy, right? And I mean, it depends. I mean, some of it, it's, it's, so how I would answer this question is, and I said this in multiple other interviews. who are you addressing that question for? Mexico or the U.S.? Let's start with Mexico.

It's their territory. Right. So Mexico probably more than likely if you kill a kingpin, violence would go up. Not always. Not always. But, you know,

I think we've seen that. We've seen that a couple of times. So it's a good historical problem. So for Mexico, that's a problem because what's Mexico's number one security concern? It's not the drugs per se. It's security. So that's why those Durango, for example,

there are many aspects of ways. We don't want to want the world. Yeah, we don't want bodies. We don't want bodies. Right. So let's take a step back. But from the US perspective, drugs. Drugs.

And now there could be an impact if you, not only if you decapitate a leader, but if they start fighting each other. Because then they're focused on fighting rather than the business, so the volume goes down. So who was, you know, those chapitos was one of the main pushers of fentanyl into the United States? Yeah, we've talked about that before. So very interestingly that the amount of fentanyl that was seized across the border dropped shortly after the Sinolawa cartel civil war started. And when did the Civil War officially start? September 2024. Okay.

Yeah, because there was also, I just had in Ben Westoff as well who wrote the book Fentanyl Inc, which is probably the greatest book ever written on like the fentanyl crisis. He wrote it back in 2019. He's continued to work on the story over the years. And part of the reason that there's been such a drop is because there have been discussions with China where Xi Jinping has actually played some ball on stopping. What's the term for it, thief, the pre- precursors? The analogs and the precursors for fentanyl. And there's been a direct correlation with that. So maybe it's a combination of both.

But there was obviously serious cooperation, not just cooperation, business alliances between. Chinese creators and cartel smugglers. I don't know, are you gonna have him back anytime soon? Because there's a key individual that I think you guys should look up. Actually, if you can for a second, look up Brother Wang. Brother Wang. Brother Wang. That's another hard name.

Right there. Zedong Zhang, aka Brother Wang. I mean, let's see in images, I think they should have an image. He's in the US already. Yeah, so that guy, the top left, the guy in the top left. Yeah, that's him. So this guy. Say BUSCA.

This guy, to your point, there's two aspects of your analyzing cartels from as holistic that you need to analyze the Chinese component of it. It's the chemical precursor route, right? And that's what Brother Wang was and the money laundering, right? That's the other aspect where the Chinese play a Kuiroa. Brother Wang was so influential that he had no problem dealing with both the Sinaloa cartel and Holiskanu Generation cartel. Both sides knew he was dealing. dealing with the other side, and they didn't touch him. And if anything, he was first captured.

He was put in house arrest. And one of the cartels went in, it was like, hey, let me get you out. Come on. Oh, in Mexico. And they got him out. And they got him out. He's like the Michael Jordan offend. And then eventually he tried to escape, try to fly back to China.

And ironically, they kind of like, I think he was, he was in a, he flew through Russia. Russia's like, yeah, this is a fake passport, dude. Now we're reporting you back to it because he was flying from Cuba. From Mexico, we went to Cuba, Cuba. to Russia, Russia to China. And the Russia was like, this is fake, get the hell out of here. And then when you went back to Cuba, Cuba was like, wait, you have a red notice on you

from Interpol from the Mexicans. And then eventually they said, you're out, and then they send him to the US. So the US got him. Poor guy. But he was powerful enough to deal with both cartels and not a single one dare to touch him. And they both knew he was dealing with the other side.

What made him so powerful? Because how are you going to get your chemical precursors from? He was the only guy that could do that with? Not the only guy, but if you already have a, well-established relationship, you get, it's a business. It's a business. It's a cocaine, man. That's right.

The cartels don't fight in Colombia. Right. They don't fight in Colombia. Like the Mexican cartels, they don't fight in Colombia. They fight in Mexico. They fight in Mexico. Right. Maybe there's a, you can make an argument.

There's a proxy war in Ecuador that they... Oh, yeah. Ecuador's been a little crazy. But in Colombia, for the most part, they're like, this is where we get our cocaine. Come on, it's business. And it's very interesting. Let's look at the Sunilununun Cal Civil War.

Named me one place outside of Mexico where the Sunilua Cartel Civil War is going on because it isn't. Right. And what's very interesting, and this is a trend that I'm glad people are starting to pick up, but it took the U.S. Afrikaan commander, the commander of Africa,

to say this in the Senate briefing, or I don't know if it was to the House or to the Senate. But he said, we're starting to notice Mexican cartels set up drug labs in Africa, like in South Africa, Nigeria, both Holiskena Generation Cartel and Suniloa Cartel. I mean, that has been a trend

that has been going on for a very long time where you have the drug trafficking, right, from like cocaine and all that, methamphetamies, et cetera, produced in Mexico or South America and then shipped overseas. Or now what they're doing is they're trying to produce it either even in Africa or even in Europe specifically. And so you're seeing an increase of drug labs being seized outside of South America and Mexico because it's some, and so what they'll do is they recruit a lot of like chemical students in Mexico after they graduate.

The cartels say, hey, we'll pay you big bucks. Come with come come help us make drug labs in South Africa, which, recently had a major drug lab bus, that the Afri-com commander said that the U.S. is able to pass intelligence. Actually, you know, we're talking about fentanyl being dropped. We're getting flooded by cocaine, like, insane. Like, it is like... In America? The world, but especially in America, to the point where the price of cocaine is dropping from a wholesale perspective. Yeah. And so this month, we had what is possibly the largest cocaine seizure in history, off the coast of Spain,

around 30 to 40 tons of cocaine was shipped. 30 to 40 tons. That's enough for the club. Off the coast of Africana boat. The Spanish Guardia CV. This was very recently. Like May 1st, I think it was a co- yeah, it was May 1st. May 26, or May 2026, record-breaking 30-ton seizure.

In early May 2026, Spanish police carried out the largest cocaine bus in Europe. history intercepting a ship carrying 30 tons of cocaine. The Camaro's flagged freighter named the Arconian was intercepted by the Guardia Seville between May 1st and May 4th, 2026. The ship was stopped in international waters off the coast of Western Sahara near the Canary Islands while traveling from Sierra Leone to Libya. The hall was valued at over $812 million or $956 million, All 23 crew members were arrested, including 17 Filipinos and six nationals from the Netherlands and Cername. The drugs were packed in 1,279 bundles.

Authorities also discovered firearms and ammunition on board. You do have to protect your shipment, obviously. But that's a woo. So we're losing the cocaine. And I mean, you can look at like South America, all the cocaine trade and everything that happened. Like, it's just like the amount of record seizures is like, oh my God. And the argument, so, and so, man, I can, man, I would love, like the cocaine, fentanyl, I would even marijuana, like that whole drug piece is like in a very, I think, interesting dynamic from a drug trip because goes back to the U.S., that's what we're concerned about and kind of the violence. Because those Cabreras and that map of Durango, that purple map, right there, they control, they have huge meth labs in Durango, like enormous amount of meth.

produce in Durango and then smuggled. So can you zoom out for a second? To the US. Yeah, to the US. If you zoom out, okay, so you see that black map, that black area, right? Okay, so that's CDN. CDN. That's the Northeast cartel.

Why do they have like a straight line? Okay, so, okay, so that's the Monte Rete Eagle Pass and that a lot of that is the human smuggling. Because CDN is one of this, so, okay, I think a lot of people, like when we talk about human smuggling in Mexico to the U.S., People automatically assume it's all cartels. And it's like, a lot of it is more like family or local criminal networks that then pay a fee to the cartels. Yeah.

But CDN is one of the cartels that's like, no, no, they're actively involved in human smuggling. Much more so than others. And that line, because Monterrey, they get a lot of the migrants and then they push it up to Eagle Pass. But what I was getting at, that purple and black, right? So Marios and CDN have an alliance, a business alliance. And there's even more suspicions that they're also an alliance fighting against those Chapito's and although the CDN has then members down to the Chapitos to fight. But a lot of the meth that is produced in Durango

and a lot of the drugs is produced in Durango then gets pushed to CDN who then smuggles into the U.S. Because CDN, they're what I would call like a border cartel. They don't control the drug distribution centers in Mexico. They don't even control the ability to get drugs cocaine from South America. But where they make their money is because they control the border areas where they can smuggle it into the U.S. And so that business alliance that they have with those Mayos is very important.

Now, you said it was early 2024 when the Chapito Civil War breaks out and then... September, yeah, September 24. Yeah, I'm sorry, September 2024 after El Mayo was... And we'll talk about that too. I want to come back to that. But, you know, that's when the fentanyl decreases because the Chapitos were moving a lot of that into America. And this is like kind of the age-old question with this.

Why did the cartels decide to emphasize so much fentanyl? And I ask this for two reasons. Number one, it's a lot cheaper than some other drugs. so there's less money to be made on it. And number two, it is the most severely damaging and kills a lot of the clientele. So why did they make this bet when it was only going to...

Because it's so easy to manufacture. So easy to make... Okay, so let's look at all the drugs in comparison, right? You have, let's say, methamphetamines, cocaine, marijuana, and, like, in fentanyl, right? Yeah. Which, fentanyl's not that hard. You don't need, for example,

with cocaine and marijuana, plantations and this and that and then you have to take care of it and then you have to crop it and there's only a certain amount of times you can and then all the problems. Fetano you just make done to package sent and you can charge a shit ton of money to do it, right? So it's funny you ask this question. One of the things I'm starting to do an initial research, I'll just say it here because if somebody wants to take my idea and run with it, I'll love it. I would not discount the possibility that the reason why there is a push to fentanyl was

that the Mexican cartels weren't in a position to adjust their business model when marijuana started to become legal in certain U.S. states. Now, let me make me something clear. Drug cartels, the legalization conversation don't mix it with the cartel violence.

Those are two, you know, there's a sum over there, but it's completely separate, right? But what was very interesting, you know, if you look up, like Mexican cartels, illegal marijuana farms in the U.S., right, cultivation in the U.S., And you look, Mexican cartels, cartels. Like, okay, wait, okay, that's the media being lazy, number one,

because there's no such thing as a Mexican cartel, like which cartel. You've got to give me a name. Number two, don't mix up Mexican crime syndicate or like the Mexican mafia with the cartel. Those are like two separate, right? Like in gangs, et cetera. Who really controls the illegal cultivation of marijuana in the United States from a criminal syndicate perspective is the Chinese, the Chinese tribes. Yes. Right.

Which is interesting. Because if you look at Mexico, the Mexican cartel, control the marijuana trade in Mexico, which is illegal. If anything, funny enough, Los Chapitos and other Mexican cartels wanted marijuana to be legal because they would have a monopoly in that market. They actually advocated inside of Mexico the legate. They wanted to see if they can get it legal because they would control that market. Right.

Because they already have it. But the question then is, why in the U.S., why is it that the Chinese triads and the crime syndicates were the one who took control of the illegal marijuana production and not the Mexican cartels? because you can look at a graph, you can look at some graphs, you can look at like marijuana drug seizures on the border,

and you can look at fentanyl drug seizures on the border. It's kind of like, you know, up and like this. And that's the question that I have. Is it that the Mexican cartels because they weren't able to, maybe they didn't even want to. They're like, it's not worth it for us. We don't want to try,

let the Chinese have it, let somebody else have it. You know, some of them do some. And they made a lot of business partnerships with them too to do that. And is there some, is there some cartels? that have maybe some marijuana production.

Yeah, of course. But is it their main business drug trafficking? No. And I think that's why. And I think they said, this is very easy to make, very easy to produce, very easy to ship and smuggle. So that's what we're going to do, regardless of the damage of the dead. Now, I would say that I think the political pushback that got to them and then the Civil

War and all that, that's now why we're seeing them refocused their efforts on cocaine. And then methamphetamine as well. But what is very interesting is we're seeing a shift. and methamphetamine productions, although it's still happening in South America and Mexico, a lot of that is now being shipped over to Europe and Africa. Why is that? Because then they've got to bring it back.

Well, but you're avoiding oversaturated routes through the Atlantic and the Pacific that are controlled by that have a lot of intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies controlling those routes. Right. Because if you're sending, look, they seize 30 tons of cocaine in Africa, right?

That's because of U.S. intelligence. They probably tracked that because it didn't start in Sierra alone for the report. That came from somewhere in South America. Now, what the AFRICOM commander highlighted is do not discount the West Africa drug trade route. And unfortunately, a lot of terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, JNAM, the Al-Qaeda affiliate there, ISIS and the Greater Sahel. They see, they kind of take a lot of money from that drug trade, and that's a huge problem. But the West Africa route to Europe is the key drug trade route as well. I track like a lot of hashish farmer,

like Moroccan drug trafficking organizations in Morocco who openly share videos on social media of them smuggling hash and cocaine over to Spain in Europe. You track it? Yeah. So there's one... Where's this guy at? Sitting up in the middle of the night, watching a boat.

I don't know if... I wonder if he got banned, actually. That's a good question. Did he get banned? There he is. Straight to Bralter. I wonder if he got... I would have to see if he got banned.

But there was a very... And actually, from a lot of the drug trade people, like, he was like, oh, yeah, you know, you know, he was very active. It looks like he might have turned it off because he would always post. But yeah, there's the Moroccan crime syndicate. Huge in drug trafficking. Huge in drug trafficking and their ability to kind of do that.

So I think those are the type of conversations that the African piece really opens up is the shift in drug trafficking routes. And there could be an intelligence reason why they did that. They don't want the law enforcement to go after them. It could be a cost, right? It's just easier to set up shop there, produce it there. And then now we can ship it with. less cost because now we can use normal trade routes and we don't have to use like the narco

submarines and da da da da da da and i think that's why but that's been a trend that we've been seeing i've been seeing in these last couple of years that more and more drug labs are being seized in you know there was one i think it was last year uh mid to late last year in poland you know the poland special forces seized a mexican suspected sinelah cartel drug lab in in poland they're everywhere man and what's interesting uh to expand on the sinola cartel civil war is Again, this idea that the violence hasn't spread outside, right? CNN had a great rapport and some of the conversations I had with people on that was if you talk to Senilea cartel operatives in the United States, for example,

they'll say, oh, that's civil war. That's a Mexican thing. Like, that does not impact us. We're not involved. We're still Sinolaa cartel. In Mexico, they might have a differentiating idea. In Mexico, we still view ourselves as Sinolaa. We're not involved in the violence.

strange. And interesting. And I said that is a very interesting dynamic because if the Civil War was having an impact internationally, there would be two things we'd see. One, violence. But number two, we would see, and we haven't really seen this and we'll see if it is that, but CG&G then would absorb those Chapito's drug trafficking routes. Just because they're completely distracted with the violence? No, no, if you're making the argument that, because if you're making the argument that the Civil War is also viewed internationally, you would see. chapito's drug trafficking routes being absorbed by CG because of the alliance.

We're not seeing that. Okay. We're not seeing that. And so that's a very, it's very interesting that the violence has confide inside of Mexico and not in, let's say, Poland or Africa, where they're there. So that's another very interesting dynamic as well. Yeah. And obviously, like this all, as we alluded to, breaks out with the very strange capture of El Mio,

which periodically comes up on different episodes of this show, even coming up on two years later, because here you have a guy who operated as the other half of the cartel effectively. You had the Al Chapo faction. You had his faction. And he's a total opposite. Old more grandfowly kind of dude living up in the hills, has a real iron fist on his operations and his power.

And it was long suspected, suspected, not confirmed. or anything that there had to be some sort of deal or some sort of understanding or some sort of straight up like alliance between him and United States intelligence. And then you see him put on a plane where he is essentially like duct taped and said, fuck it, you're going to America. And he's met on the runway by all kinds of, obviously, American agencies and law enforcement arrested. And we don't hear a fuck ton about it.

Obviously, he's been going through hearings and stuff. I believe here in New York. But like, that kind of came out of nowhere, and I still haven't gotten a straight answer from people. I don't know. There is one, to be clear, about what the hell happened there? As far as you can tell, though, you know, what's your best theory or what information do you see or know that could say this is, this is what it was. Either he was working with the U.S. or he wasn't. From my understanding, he wasn't.

He was just untouchable. That's why the U.S. didn't tell Mexico about this operation. If anything, the Mexicans were the one who were protecting him. So, like, in the 40 years, he was a drug trafficking, drug trafficker. There was literally not a single time he was almost captured. Why would the Mexicans protect him? Because he was better to deal with than Chapo? Yeah.

I mean, you can make the argument that Maya was the real power of this in a long ago. Yes, I've heard that. Chappo is the face. I would fall within that realm. And if anything, I think I like how you said, you know, the older gentleman in the mountains. If one thing towards the later part of his life from Mayo specifically, he was much more interested in maintaining the peace. So anytime there would be factions of the Sinaloa cartel fighting each other. So, for example, there was a, Los Rusos were fighting Los Al-Sars, which are two factions of the Sunilalalal cartel, you know, way back before the split happened.

Like, and Mayo would personally get involved to try to stop it. And even to a point where he kicked out the Russo temporarily, there was reporting that he kicked him out of the organization because they wouldn't bend to his will. And then the Russo's like, oh, shit, okay, okay, no, no, no. Because the Rusos are still, to this day, part of the Mayos. Interesting. right um the russians are called um not they're not affiliated with russia or president puttin or anything like that um they just love to troll and their leader's nickname is the russian so that's it um actually i can even show you in the map to so if so we go from the map for a

second so we're gonna use the shit out dude i i anytime you have a guest that talks about cartels by all we're gonna have this up so go all the way to the top left corner you see that little purple strip that kind of goes down between the yellow, like orange. Yeah. Now go left. You see that purple on the left of that. Right there. Click that. Should say there, Los Ruses. La Maiza? No, no. Further. Actually, let me see. See, he's checking there. That? Right here, right here. Los Rusos are an armed wing of the Sinaloa cartel, specifically aligned with Ismail and Mayo Zambaba. They operate as part of La Maiza, the Mayo Loyalist faction, and their main rival within the cartel are Los Chapitos, the sons of Joaquin El Chapoosma.

So they used to fight heavily against Los Salazars. Los Salazars used to belong to Los Chapitos, but then they formed their own group, which is that yellow. Now you see that yellow that brought right there. So if you click there, they broke off and they formed. And you can see the black. That's, again, Hearst's map. I mean, Hearst diagram on the top. They formed what's called the independent cartel of Sonora, which is Los Salazar, Los paredes and the cacadores. They all used to belong to the Chapitos. So before the Sinolaa cartels of a war, the Mayo of those Chapitos, this was a break that happened before that, where these three factions said, we're done with those Chapitos, reforming our own

group. And so they loosely called themselves the independent cartels, and Orr was a confederation. But the Russo used to fight heavily against Los Salazars. And then the Mayo was the one who said, hey, we need this peace. And even when this kind of violence happened over here with the independent cartels of Sonora, even Maya was, you know, that was Chapito problem. but he was still very interested in trying to maintain it. You know, this is kind of what was going on. He was more, he already made it. Like, what else does he need?

So I think he just knew a lot of Mexicans during laundry, and he knew how to operate an assistant to make sure he was untouchable that even the Mexicans didn't want to go after him. And I think that's why during the Biden administration, they said, we're going to go after him, and they used Joaquin Guzman, the son, to do that. And I think the way, the reasoning they were able to churn them is because they managed to extraditio Guzman.

right after the second kuleycanazo in 2023 what was very interesting is when the kulekanazzo happened and ovidu guzman was captured those chapitos felt betrayed that the mayos did not respond because if you go so go back if you go back to kisnolova so scroll down right so that yellow area okay so zoom in on the where kuli so it's a little bit further down sorry

keep on going keep on go okay so that where the yellow and then that right there kulia khan where all the little center areas like the cyan, go down, go down right there. Okay, so before this, so you see, that yellow wasn't always that far out, but you can see towards the east of it and the northeast, like that's Mayo's territory, right?

That's, for the most part, if you go two years back, you know, a little bit different, but for the most part, that's where it was. Like, the Mayos were further in, and those Chapitos, as you said, kind of control the urban area. When Obido-Gusman was captured, the Culea-Canaso happened,

where the Chapitos just went to haywire and brought the city to violence, they wanted the Mayo's to help. And the Mayoes didn't. That's a no-no. And so my suspicion was the U.S. then was able to let, because Ovidio Guzman was in prison

and they had conversations with them, they were like, Ovidio probably said, hey, we can help you get in Mayo. I can get my brother, Joaquin, who's within those chapitos is absolutely irrelevant. It's an irrelevant figure, less so than even more irrelevant to Jesus Alfredo.

And I think Joaquin Guzman was a sacrificial lamb. And then they managed to get him and to trick Maya Zambollah to get on a plane and fly him over to El Paso where he was arrested. And then his son took over Maito Fleco. He's Mael. Okay. I got to go to the bathroom real fast, but I want to talk about the sun when we get back. And then there's a bigger picture there thing, too, that I want to get to and get your thoughts on.

So we'll be right back. It's funny. We were just talking off camera so you know Nidu. Yeah. I thought we were alive. I didn't know that. But yeah, Jeff, he didn't remember you did the space. I kept hearing your voice and I'm like, God damn, I've heard this voice before. It's because, you know, on Twitter, you're like behind profile handles and whatever. There's a ton of people talking. But yeah, we did a space right after the Iran war broke out. I remember that. It's funny. And, no, the Venezuela, the Maduro raid. Yeah, but this was, we were talking about both because this was right after Iran broke out. I remember. Yeah. And so, yeah. So, Jeff, I've also been on his show, great. You know, he's, he's right.

Jeff knows his shit, man. You know, there's a lot. And we've actually done where anytime something major happens in Mexico, like, it'll be Jeff, Katarina, myself, just a quick, oh, we've got to go live. So, you know, if you ever want to join us on live, we just, the three of us, oh, what's going on? And we did that for when a men show was killed. He did a breaking news live space on Twitter and YouTube.

And we were all trying to react. I was trying to check the news and all that because it was just chaos. So shut out, Nadu. Nudu always finds a way to come up on these shows. He's been on the show a couple times. He's a great job. But we were talking about El Mayo's son before we went to break right there. So he's been effectively in charge of that faction since his father, since the day his father was captured.

And that's very interesting how quickly he was able to consolidate control. Now, so here's the thing, right? When you're the up-in-coming leader, you obviously get in the position of power because the faction leader's coales around you. And they say, yes, we acknowledge you're going to be a leader. But if one thing, El Mayo, Maito Flaco has been very good at is saying, I'm not going to rule where I'm beholden to my faction leaders. My faction leaders are going to be beholden to me.

I'm going to have the gravitas of my father, right? And I think, you know, he's getting there. And it's very interesting how his operational approach has been to just go on a war path everywhere. Like he's not holding back. He's declared one of the chapitos. He's increased his offensive operations. against Halisk New Generation Cartel in Chiapas, Zakatakotas, Nayarit.

You can even make the argument that in Zacatecas, he's doing pretty, pretty well. There's very interesting dynamics there. And so that's where he's kind of been that figure in. And he is getting to the point where he's also having that same. It's very interesting. Like, again, it's like we were talking about the emojis. Or I don't know if we mentioned that before. Oh, yeah, the Chapito.

Yeah, the pumpkin and all that. So it's very interesting before the Mayos were always that hat, right? The cowboy hat. Now it's the horse because that's his symbol. So everything now is kind of centered around the horse. And that's why when you see the watermarks of some of these videos, that's how you can tell where did that video get pushed from? Is it a chopped?

Because it'll put the watermark and some of them have that. And so like the famous one, it's always the, there's a one that's like the horse head with a cowboy hat and then the horse is eating a pizza, slice of pizza, right? It's the trolling. And so that's kind of the things. But yes, you're starting to see, and I wouldn't even say starting, it's almost complete where Maito Flaco has that absolute control. And if anything, even Los Cabreras, I've heard kind of reports that he was kind of upset with those Cabreras because the Cabreras haven't been doing so well. One of their factions called Grupo Flecha.

Groupo Frecha? Groupo Flecha, which is the arrow group, like the bone arrow. So actually, that's their emoji. They have like a bone arrow. It's kind of hard. Yeah, so they have not been doing so well. And so I think I've heard rumors of kind of his frustration with them. And, you know, nobody's really going to challenge.

So then the question then becomes, you know, with Holisken New Generation Cartel, which I know we can go after, you know, with a mentor, that his steps on O3 kind of took over, you know, that's kind of what to see. But I would say Maito Flaqua has absolute control over his organization. Now, what I was thinking with the whole El Mayo thing, though, and this has been in my head before that even happened in 2024, for, but it's just the persistent thought since with some people I've also talked with in the studio here is where at least United States intelligence really stands on the cartels.

And let me give you some context, what I mean by that. So my friend Luis Navia was in here back in episodes 221 and 222. And he was effectively, it's very real. He was like by the end of his career, like the chief smuggler for every cartel except the Asian ones around the world. And he was taking down an operation journey in Venezuela in 2000. It was like 15 different countries working on and all kinds of shit. And so he, you know, this is a guy who knew and touched pretty much everyone, you know, knew Pablo Escobar, knew the leaders of the Mexican cartels, all these different things. And obviously he gives a great breakdown of that. And he's the kind of guy like he's helped with things attacking the cartels with the government and stuff since then, like even after he was

out of prison and everything. Like he just like, he enjoys being around it, I guess. And so there was a guy that I got connected to back then through him that was a, he's a, he's a CIA knock. And, you know, says he's not in it anymore. But, you know, he's been in it for 50 years. And now he's a part of a company that has four X intelligence guys that happens to show up in a lot of third world countries and six months later.

poof, you know, new leadership happens in the country. So, you know, you can do with that what you will. But this guy will talk to me on WhatsApp sometimes and I'm not really sure what to think of it. But good dude, with me at least. But, you know, his career, the story of his career is very telling to me because he was effectively doing a regular job, won't say what it was on the West Coast. and he was dating the niece of a very, very high-placed, like the highest-place cartel guys in Mexico. This is early days. So I guess like CIA was watching him, like who the fuck is this guy who's fucking the niece of so-and-so?

They see him going to Mexico, staying at the house sometimes, and they basically looked at him and they're like, this guy would make a great spy. So they went to him and they said, hey, you know, we want you to work for us. You'd be a knock. You're going to be. using your connections and eventually you're going to end up fully in Mexico so we can know

what's going on and everything. He was like, oh, hell no. Listen, I have no business, whatever my girls' uncles are doing. Like that's not my problem. I'm not going to be a rat and like take them down. And they're like, take them down. What do you mean take? No, we don't want you to take them down.

We want you to work with them. And basically they were like, no, no, the point is not to stop this. We want to use this machine for all the other means. that we want to get after. Long story short, he ends up down there for as far as I can tell. It was like 20, 30 years, something like that. And you see story after story like this where intelligence services are operating within the cartels. And to be clear, their job is not to be the FBI and like make arrests. I understand that. But like it doesn't seem like they're trying to stop these guys. So when you see something like El Mayo happened, do you not wonder if it's like a bigger picture,

you know, really just a pawn on the board play so they can. maybe he wasn't playing ball on certain things that they wanted to do. So let me ask this. What years are we talking about when this whole knack and all that, more or less? This guy would have been for that role, as best as I can tell, he would have started in the 70s, and he would have still been doing it in the 2000s, maybe into the early 2010s. So I can tell you right now, and again, you can look at this Reuters about the CIA. The CIA is, if anything,

especially now with the Trump administration are going to, if they're not the lead, if they're not already, they're going to be the lead agency to taking down these cartels. They are a key component. And I think there's a, you know, people don't, I'm going to use this. Like, for example, when I was deployed

and when I was doing work in the company, like, yeah, we, you know, we interacted with the CIA. Now, granted, I was an analyst, so we mostly talked to the analysts. Yeah, yeah. I do believe a lot of times it's like, it gets like over, I guess that whole secrecy thing

Like, you know, like everything is a secret squirrel. Everything is so mysterious and it's the CIA everywhere. And I just say people like, you know, I remember the first time I ever dealt with the agency. I remember thinking to myself, my first reaction was, because I was like a lieutenant, I was like, man, this is like the office. What the hell? Underwhelming. Yeah.

But just, but just, you know, now granted, analyst, analyst. But it was like, you know, I do believe that the CIA, at least in the 70s, obviously their priority was communists and they didn't give a shit about it. They were like, oh, we don't. Exactly. I would agree with you. We, like the whole Iran-Contra, you know, it was communists and all that. Now there has been even for a while this fundamental shift in the prerogatives of the CIA in the Western Hemisphere, specific with the Trump administration, where now the priority and the emphasis is stopping all of this, right? I mean, they have been, I would even make the argument that in many operations that led to the capture of the death of a cartel member, it probably became, it came from information from the CIA. Again, is that just them wiping what they view as a pawn off the board when the pawn gets annoying

with how they actually want to do things and they can find someone better? I mean, I guess there's a question then, though, is the argument the CIA is involved in the drug trade and they're trying to do it to make as much money as possible? Or is there other motives to do? I don't think it would be to make as much money as possible. There's better ways to do that. I've never thought of that angle. That wouldn't be what I would think.

It would be for the intelligence sources. And I'll give you another example. I did have a knock sitting in that chair twice, Matthew Hedger, and it would be more recent years, who became a major league money launderer for the cartels at the behest of the CIA. And one of the things he did, and he described it in detail here about how he flipped a top 10 banker at a top 10 bank in a bar to launder money for the cartels. You know, that's not really stopping the cartels. It's kind of assisting in the process. And so that's the conversation.

So, and that from the development from intelligence sources, you know, That's where the question now that we have, though, is that now, for example, especially with all these drone strikes that we're going on, now that can we say, has that fundamentally changed from the directive to the agency? And I think because a lot of the operations, the Maya one, 100, like, there's a lot of interagency. I think one of the very interesting conversations, like if I'm a DEA guy, Kiki. I'm wondering and concerned about if my position now is, my agency is redundant.

because the FBI is going to be is a lot more involved in a lot of this. Actually, the Mayo capture, it's not necessarily what, you know, the CIA obviously plays a role and they're playing a lot of role, especially in the vetted units. Do not underestimate CIA's Mexican vetted unit. Those guys don't. Those guys do not play around. Why? They're the top of the top of Mexico Special Forces.

Like if you're going to look at like the Mexico Steel Team 6 and Delta, it's the Mexican Special Forces vetted unit by the CIA. I'm telling you this Reuter reports read it. It's phenomenal. And if you read that, you actually, I don't know, you could do like Royder, C, Mexico, maybe they have a, like, to search it to find it. And you read it and it lays out, holy shed, how this Mexican unit, through information through the CIA that they get it, are actively going against a lot of these people, right?

And it kind of goes, it kind of undermines that argument of, well, why do we need to do unilateral operations if we could just have our vetted units do it? I think, is this it? Yeah. Inside the CIA's secret fight. And they would do this for a while. And they would do this for a while. Mexican drug cartels working with special Mexican army and Navy units. The CIA for years has been

running covert operations to hunt down Mexico's most wanted narcos, a Reuters investigation fines among the captures, the son of cartel chief Joaquin El Chapo Guzman. Let's scroll down and read some of this. In January 2023, the Mexican government deployed helicopter gunships and hundreds of soldiers into rural Sinaloa to capture Ovidio Guzman Lopez, the son of the imprisoned cartel kingpin, Joaquin Alchapo Guzman, in the hunt for the young capo, the mission. architects worked hand-in-glove with a powerful American backer, the Central Intelligence Agency. Ahead of the raid, America's premier spy agency leveraged its vast eavesdropping apparatus to surveil the communications of Guzman's associates to locate him in his mother's hometown

in the western Sierra Madre Mountains, according to four former intelligence and law enforcement sources. CIA analysts assembled a detailed dossier known as Targeting Package on El Chapo's flashy son, the CIA was helped by Intel from a member of Old Video's Circle who had security flipped, three of the sources added. Let me just go a little more deep. Finally, to carry out the arrest itself, the Mexican army deployed an elite unit that was trained, equipped, and vetted by the CIA. A dozen current and former U.S. and Mexican officials said a Reuters investigation is found that the CIA has been running covert ops in Mexico for years to track down the country's most wanted drug traffickers. The secret, the U.S. spy agency works closely with special narco-hunting units

inside the Mexican military. With the permission of the Mexican government, the CIA gives training and equipment to these outfits as well as financial backing for activities like travel. The U.S. spy agency also screens their members with U.S. administered polygraph tests, which is why the groups are often called CIA vetted units. Today, there are at least two such CIA vetted military units operating in Mexico in addition to the Mexican Army Group, the Nabdol video. There is a special Mexican Navy intelligence outfit, according to eight current and former Mexican and U.S. officials. So I say that, right?

And obviously not that's why we were talking about the better way we saw perinition propaganda. Like HSI has one, FBI, DA. FBI, for my understanding, for my reporting, and I posted this shortly after because I reached out to sources. The capture of Amaya was really who deserves all the credits, FBI. Why is that? They were the ones who led it from Maya's sources and my conversation. So they had like an inside. They had a way to get inside.

Yeah, they had a way to inside, talk to Huakin Guzman and use Huakin Guzman to turn in Amayo, right? this one obviously this is talking about video guzman's with the CIA and how they do it now to your to your overall point because I was like thinking why you're reading that let me let me put this way let's imagine again I'm making the scenario but let's imagine you're the CIA right director and you have a priority obviously to get sources inside of China you want to know what Xi Jinping's thinking what they're talking about and you find maybe I don't know one of Xi Jinping's I'm going to make it up nephews is hugely involved in money laundering for cartels.

That would be a great find. And would you think that the CIA's priority then is going to try to get him to turn him over or to find a way to make him successful and make him into a source and find ways to levers out because you overall power, you know, is to get info on Chees Jinping, right? Second one. Yeah. Now are you, now you can blast them. Got it.

But in the end of, I mean, welcome to the reality of the world of just like, well, it's Xi Jinping we're talking about. Right. Right. You know, now, granted, maybe if with, now this is where the administration comes. Oh, I'd be okay with, hold on a minute. I'd be okay with this. Yeah. Because that's, that is like, forget all the bullshit CIA does. That's actually the job is to cultivate the intelligence in an effort to actually stem this from happening in the future. And I think a lot of these sources and these acts like what you would say is like they're not going. They're not going to know why. Yeah. And then that's where they're just a little, that's the pawn of the game. Now, can you make the argument in my own some areas and some aspects in public going, especially in the Cold War and now where that, yeah, sure. I'm not. I'm not. not debating that, we're not going to get the full picture. But as this report laid out, and oh, by the way, when we were talking about the CNN report where they were doing unilateral assassinations, the New York Time report is the one that they didn't do the assassinations, the Mexicans doing it through the SORCA, also shows that they're a key

component of the cartel fight, and that goes to my point about the DEA. You have the FBI being the lead agency that captured in Mayo, the FBI doing a lot. Ryan Weddings, right? Who was the one who announced Ryan Weddings was captured? Cash Patel. So if you're the- Don't give him. Come on.

I'm just saying who's an answer. I'm not going to be anybody crying. He was an answer, right? Look, he was the messenger. I'm not disputing that. You know. One eye hunt and one eye fishing. But, you know, it was the FBI.

Right? Again, if you're the DEA, then why are you here? That's, and I think there's going to be a lot of that intra-agency thing. Look, D.A does great things and D-D-W. But this always has been viewed as a DEA. What I'm trying to get out. I'm not trying to attack the DEA. That's not what I'm getting in it.

I understand. But it's like now with this, specific with the Trump administration, I think that before and after, if there's one thing that's going to change is this component of U.S. national security in foreign policy, where this is going to be the primary aspect

of U.S. law enforcement, intelligence, and military. It's going to be this counter-cartel fight, right? It's going to be this drug-tracked-a-ficking fight. This shield of America, you can blast it as bravado? Fine. I'm not disputing that. Obviously now, you know,

Christian Nome, the former Homeland Security Secretary, who's now the head of, you know, of America, we can say what we want. But do not underestimate the influence it's gaining with a lot of Latin American countries who then is going to turn that into what we don't want China, for example, to be your main economic partner.

We don't want them to control this port. We don't want them to control this. Because for example, Ecuador- I'm down with that. But President Naboa, like, he is all like, let's go. And to be honest, he has a lot of the popular backing for people to be like, yeah, we view cartels as, and these gang members,

those Lobos and the tornadoes being the two main ones, that are foreign terrorist organizations declared by the U.S. He has the support of Ecuadorian people to have your rule because they're done. Dude, yeah, Luis Navia was telling me about this over two years ago. And how pounded the table is like, bro, you got to look at fucking Ecuador. I'm here right now, brother. It's crazy. And the more I hear from, you know, just like around the edges,

guys like you, like talking about this, there's a lot fucking going. And no one talks about it like in at length, but there's a lot going on. So here's the reason why. Here's the reason why. I'll give you a down and journey of why. So there's just multiple games, but the two ones are Los Lobos and Los Chorneros. Los Lobos have an alliance with CG and G, Los Choneros, right?

And so that's why I was saying that's proxy fight. So like Ecuador is the one area where you can say the extension of the Mexican cartel wars is kind of continuing with the lobes and those choneros. The reason why it's so important is because Ecuador, the Pacific route in, in the drug trafficking, accounts for 70 to 80% of the drugs that reach to the United States. It's a Pacific. 70 to 80% of the, it's assessed 70 to 80% of the drugs that reach to the United States come from the Maritime Pacific route.

Wow. Okay. So that's why one of the specific ports in Ecuador so important is for the drug trade is Guayaquil. Guayaquil. Yes. Can we pull that up on a map? How do you spell it? G-U-A-Y-A.

Q-U-I-L. You got it? No, but in Ecuador. So, yeah, but go all the way. So zoom out. You can just zoom out and go to Ecuador, right, down, in, left, left, left. There it is. Keep on going, that right there.

You see the GUA? Keep our scrolling in, keep us scrolling in, keep us scrolling in, right there. Right, that, that, that, right there. Gilekeal? Yeah, that's it. That, a lot of the violence is there is astronomical, but because a lot of the drugs end up there, right? Because it's kind of a port place. Yeah, yeah.

And so, and so the Colombian Pacific and the Ecuador are huge for the drug trafficking. route. So that's why the lobes of Torneros and other gangs, the violence is there. You can't talk about another shout out to Jaff. You can't talk about Ecuador without talking about the Albanian mafia. They're huge. Oh, yeah. They're huge in there. Yeah. And so, but a lot of international groups there. So, so because when you're looking at the drug trade and organized crime, for example,

a lot of the things when people said, well, you know, they said, well, Maduro was involved in the drug trade. And then they said, well, Venezuela and the Caribbean route only accounts for 8% of the drugs. It's like, Okay, what you're focusing on is the export import, right? How does it, where does it leave from and how does it get to the U.S.? Or granted Venezuela from a drug trade perspective was much more heavily to Europe than to the U.S., right? If that's the European route, but you're mixing, you're focusing on the wrong thing. Because by that logic, then Mexican cartels aren't responsible for any drugs reaching the U.S.

If you're going to use a drug trade route, well, it's really just Ecuador, so we should just bomb and seize Ecuador. But that's not how these organizations operate from. It's they control, they're like the managers. They're like the company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're the ones that manage everything. The planning and getting it, processing it, getting either directly through networks they control

or third-party networks that they pay and manage to get it to where they need to go. They're UPS. I always say, what's a cartel? Think of Amazon and Blackwater merged into one. Ooh, that's good. That's my comparison for Mexican cartels. Dezos and Prince.

What a combo. And then when it gets to the U.S., it's like the maritime, like a MERSC, like the maritime ship. Like all they care about is getting the drug to a destination in the U.S., Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Tulsa Oklahoma, for all they care. But once it reaches to a certain point in the U.S., the Sinaloa cartel, the CJNG, the Mexican cartel is like, all right, to the local gangs or organized crimes. Your problem now. Here's the drugs you sell it to the Americans. We are out. That's why there was a great report from the Boston Globe

where the DEA said, they detained dozens of Cinelloa cartel operators in a major drug bust in the Northeast, in the Northeast, right, in the Massachusetts and Maine. And it was like, not a single one of them was, that was just a press statement. It was a lie. Not a single one of them listened to call it to cartel members.

They just trafficked cocaine and sell drugs to the people. But like, you're not, that's it. Yeah, the DEA said it arrested 171 high-ranking Sinaloa cartel members, a spotlight investigation found that's not true. We're going to Mike Benz it real quick. You ever see this trick? Yeah, of course. I was going to say, you're an O-Sin.

You got to know this. Of course you do. Yeah, this was so cool when Benzzi showed us this. There's another one. If Archive doesn't work, the other one is, I don't know if you want to say that, but remove paywall.com. Yeah, we can say. What are they going to do about it?

All right. So let's go down a little bit. All right. President Trump's escalating war against Latin America cartels crashed into this leafy old mill town with surprising force one morning in late August when heavily armed federal agents and local police kicked off a series of raids by tossing a flashbang grenade and bashing in a door. The show of force was followed by an announcement from Fed authorities that in coordinated raids across New England they had seized more than 500 pounds of drugs and captured nearly 200 members of Mexico's notorious Sinaloa cartel, the violent syndicate that supplies illegal drugs to the U.S., especially. Special Agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's New England Division, Jared Forget, unfortunate name, said the crackdown led to 171 cartel member arrests across the region, including 27 and Franklin. The DEA didn't name any of the suspects because

they forgot them, but Forget described that as a high-level arrest, they were part of a national sweep that netted more than 600 operatives of the feared organization over five days. So here's one of my favorite questions. I'm going to see, scroll down. Let me see if I can find it. Hold on. We're the DEA. We're not going after low-level retail drug traffickers, forget, told the interviewer at the time. Here's scroll down. It's from the father of one of them. The father? Okay, so I can guarantee that he's not part of the Cinelloa cartel, Scott Alady, said of his son, Tyler, very Spanish name there, who was charged in state court in Franklin with a felony-level drug sale and immediately released. without having to post bail. He isn't a high-ranking member of anything.

He's high-ranking dumb. Yeah, W for the dad on the last part of that quote. So why do I show this, this article, right? I mean, because it goes back to this idea of how do cartels operate. Like, for example, when we're talking about, why weren't the cartels able to seize the illegal marijuana trade in the U.S.? Because that's not what they're here for. They don't, you're not, and anybody, if you go to the street and somebody says,

oh, I'm selling cocaine directly to somebody. He's like, oh, I work for this, no, no, cartels. No, you don't. Shut up. That's not how this works. Hell, you're not even going to find that in Mexico, man. It's actually one of the things that actually happens in Mexico, they're very protective of their brand. If you start throwing that you're like a...

Oh, you're done. Yeah, yeah. And if you're not, oh, they'll just remember you record it and share it. They'll send it to your family in multiple boxes. In the U.S., that's what they... They're wholesale. Get all the drugs in one area and then you figure it out. Yeah.

That's the business. And because what is a... You know one of my favorite scenes? in in, um, Sicario 2 is when they crossed the border, and you remember there was that van and they're trying to cross the border and there's like, and it's very ominous and then the dude opens it and it's just a mom with the child. Oh, it's good money and I bring my child up because nobody thinks anything about it. It's like, yes. What is a cartel member in the U.S.? Lawyers, businessmen, accountants. Yep. How do you, you know, make fraud, you know,

make fraud, fraudulent documents, cash businesses. That's what they are. Yes, there's Sicario here. Sure. That's not the majority of them. Why? They're not here to shoot people up. They're here to make money.

So you need to have an operation inside of the United States capable of making tens of billions of dollars yearly, either from drug trade, or here's another one where specifically the Holiskennew Generation Cartel probably makes at least a billion dollars a year, if not more. Selling stolen Mexican oil.

who American? Oh, yeah. There was indictments in Texas from families who were buying Mexican oil from Primito. Wasn't there Utah as well? Yeah. Yeah.

So, for example, one of the sanctions, actually, if you scroll out and go back to Mexico, I'll show you, so this guy, Primito, so scroll in northeast by Brownsville, Texas. Okay, so scroll a little bit more in. So the light blue, click on the light blue. So that's Metros, right?

The Metros. The guy here, the leader, Here is Primitos. So the Gulf Cartel had a civil war, and so there's two groups. It's that light blue and then the dark blue that is Group of Scorpion, the Scorpion, right? So those are the two. The black we said is a different cartel was the Northeast Cartel. The red underneath that is a, it's called old school Zetas, right?

So those are the three groups in the Zetas Vueges Escuela, Metros in Group Scorpion. Metros and Group of Scorpion are two factions of the Gulf Cartel, but in reality the Metro now should be considered instead of a faction of the Gulf cartel, they're basically C.J&G in Tamalipas. And leader Primito has very deep, he had very deep personal relationship with El Mencho,

which one of the questions for me was when El Mentiono was killed, what happens to Brimito, what happens to his influence within the organization? Because although he wasn't part on paper of the leadership, that was El Cardinero,

before the Cardinero was with Cardinero. El Sapo Zero-3 and R were the top four. El Primito had a lot of personal relationship with Mention. So now that Mentional is killed and now El Mentional steps on O3 took over, what happens to Primito? But Primito was sanctioned by O fact because he was heavily involved in the of selling stolen oil into Texas. And some of those indictments in Texas was because of him. And so he's key.

So they have, you see that red line, they have an alliance with the old school Zetas and they used to be fighting for years against Scorpion Group. But in February 2025, shortly after Trump assumed office, Metros and Scorpion Group declared a ceasefire because the violence was getting out of hand. Actually, American citizen died from an IED in Tamaolipas because of the war in 2025, I believe in February or late January. And so the Mexican government in the Tapanipa state government kind of went to the metros and Staten scoping groups. Can you guys stop? Yeah. We like this is getting out of hand. You guys need to stop. You talked earlier about your time interfacing with, I forget this specific group, but with elements of the Mexican

military and how great these guys were. And MPs, yeah, the military and and talented. and trying to go after the cartels and all that. So we're not talking about in the factions you're working with people that are, you know, secretly on the take from the cartel and stuff like that. These are guys that are going after it. That said, all different elements of the government or other parts of the military and things like that. We see it over and over again. They're actually just working with the cartels.

So it's kind of like whack-a-mole all the time because you got your groups of good guys who are trying to stop shit. They go stop something and then something happens on the other side. And now they got to go try to stop that because their other guys are on the inside making that happen. How possible is it to really get a, like we've been looking at this map all day. It's like fucking Game of Thrones except there's no, it's not the government. It's all a bunch of fucking cartels. Here, scroll out. Just one sec, just scroll out.

Go go down. Keep on going down. Like mid-Mexico, zoom in on mid-Mexico. You see that like go left a little bit, that yellowish again? Yeah. Like one of there. Okay, let me see. Isn't this where Dave Frank was shooting it out?

Dave. it's pretty fucking similar right uh wait no no where's the reyes scroll in there there is a resistance I'm gonna find where's the reyes you see I know because that's Knights Templar

it should be around here oh right here scroll there that's right there let me go there okay I was like I knew it was there like there it is okay so that's called Los Reyes Michoacan Los Reyes so that's loosely

part of what's called the United Cartel Cartels Unitos the United Cartels has various different groups. One of the group is called Los Reyes, and this guy specifically, the leader that's called R5R5. There's Mexican military bases there right in that town, Los Reyes. Guess who they, guess who they work for? That guy. Yeah, I was going to say, they got to be on. Like, even CG&G is like, you guys work for these guys, so we're going to go mess you up. And CJ&G and G and Zakatas, they have a front called Forces Sackatecas, Nueva Generation. They've been blasting

the Zacatecas State believe specifically the frizz, F-R-I-Z, and a former, actually funny enough, they were blasting a general. He was in charge of the 11th military zone of Mexico, the Mexican Army in Zacatecas. They were blacked for being on Mayo's payroll. They actually released a statement that I kind of made a tweet about it. It's like, hey, this specific Mexican general, they've been blasting for being on the payroll in the Mayo's. And like two days ago, I found out he got relieved of command.

I was like, I wonder if that had to do with anything or, you know, but. Maybe. But they were, like, blasting. And so, but to your point, like, you, like, why was Governor Rocha, right? The governor, the former governor, Sinolaa, who just resigned and died it because he was with Los Chapitos. So when the Cinaloa cartels of what happened, you had a situation where the Mexican federal government clearly was supporting the Mayos, like, undisputable, like, it was clear as day.

The Mexican military was helping the Mayos. And now you run into an issue where the state police and even the municipal police had a long history of working with Los Chapitos. It's just like it's a cluster fuck. Actually, here's a cluster fuck. Look up. I'm dude, I'm like, let's see where? I'll go.

Look this guy up. General and then it's Thi en Fuego. It's C-I-E-N. So for people, when you notice me speak, sorry. I used to live in Spain for seven years. So the way I learned Spanish is the Cetheo. Yeah. Okay.

Actually, do me a fair. Barcelona. Put New York Times on the Google with that. Like, that, that, let's see. Uh-huh. We'll archive that. That's a hard thing. Dude, read this.

And I mean, it's a long article. Don't get me wrong. Whoever made Narcos, like, I hope you listen to a lot of podcasts like this because the material, bro. All right, the C and Fuego's affair, inside the case that upended the drug war in Mexico. At Times Magazine, ProPublica investigation reveals how the U.S. painstakingly built a case against a Mexican general suspected of links to OC and then decided to live. let him go. All right, let's read a little bit of this. So, when the Sienfuegos family landed at Los Angeles International Airport on October 15, 2020, they looked excited and maybe a bit relieved. With the pandemic still ravaging Mexico, they had come to vacation in Southern California. Raging such a visit

wasn't a problem, even on short notice. The Patriarch, retired General Salvatore Sianfuego Cepada, had made powerful American friends during his six years of Mexico's defense minister. When he needed favor like visas for his wife, daughters and granddaughters, he could call someone at the Pentagon or the CIA. But as the family approached the passport line, an immigration officer, waved them to the side. A trim middle-aged man, dressed like the general in a blue blazer and jeans, stepped forward and introduced himself in Spanish as a special agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Could he speak with the general privately? He asked. Two men crowded into a small office with several other law enforcement officers. There is a warrant for your arrest, sir,

the agent said. This is a copy of the indictment against you. See and Fuegos wore a face mask with a clear plastic shield over it, but there was no hiding the confusion and anger. There must be some mistake he insisted. Do you know who he hit him with it? Do you know who I am? The agents did. For years, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies had been watching San Fuego's as he rose through the Mexican Army, become defense minister in 2012.

Since late 2015, the DEA had been investigated what it believed were Sienfuegos corrupt dealings with a second-tier drug gang based in the small Pacific Coast state, and they are it. In 2019, he had been secretly indicted on drug conspiracy charges by a federal grand jury in Brooklyn. I have worked with your CIA, Sienfuegos protested. I have been honored by your Department of Defense. I understand the DEA agent said, but you have still been charged. In the tumultuous days before the 2020 election with COVID cases surging, President Donald Trump brainstorming and Senate Republicans rushing in to confirm a Supreme Court justice, the jailing of a retired Mexican general didn't make the front pages even in Los Angeles. It did make headlines

in Mexico City, but President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico, who had long promised to vanquished the country's deeply rooted corruption, seemed to take the news in stride. It is a very regrettable fact that a former defense secretary should be arrested on charges of having ties to drug trafficking, he said the next morning. We must continue to insist, and hopefully this helps us understand that the main problem of Mexico is corruption. The U.S. law enforcement agencies have gone after Mexican officials before, yada, yada yada. Siamfuegos, though, was the most consequential Mexican official ever charged in the U.S. court. Nearly two years into his retirement, he remained unusually influential,

having groomed a generation of army leaders. And I'm remembering this case now. Whatever became of this? So Amno, after that, threw a fit. Yeah. And so the U.S. just said, okay, we'll let him go if you guys investigate and then charge him. And the Mexicans like, yeah, we'll investigate.

And they let him go. That's why now I think this is where I think now in the second Trump administration, they're like, oh, hell no. We're not going to do whatever. You know, you're not going to. Read this article. Like, it's, it's because why, the reason why I bring this up, though, is to your point, because I think a lot of people, which is true, right? When we're talking about it's like, oh, the cartels corrupt the government, which is true. But this case actually shows the other way around. And there's a great description here in which they're going after one of the leaders and he sends in the special forces to go after them. And when the cartel leader surrenders, he says, I'm the en fuego's guy. I'm the Mfogos guy

What are you doing? And the Mexican special forces Then just execute him on the spot Based on this indictment Whoa And And And

South of the border justice right there And it's like I think you know what I can probably if I remember You can because there's a whole history Where he lays it down And I think it was BLO If I'm not mistake

I think it was Ace Dos Who they were specifically Then the opera Do this Control F And then put H2 Is there any No

Is not H2? Interesting. Hold on. The four brothers were key figures. H2 was a, oh, it's got dash, that's why. So it says H2 was a volatile moon face, scarcely known outside of the regional underworld. Growing up on the outskirts of Masatlan, the Sinola Beach City, he became a Sicario or hitman for the Massa Laco's. A local gang closely affiliated with the Beltrons and later emerged as a lieutenant to Hector

Beltron. After the Capo's arrest, H2 and his men were like orphans, a former Mexican official told me. H2 gathered his forces in Nairit, a state wedged among the narco strongholds of Sinaloa, Durango, and Holisco. He procured opium gum from Nairat's eastern highlands and used BLO connections to ship heroin and other drugs into the United States. As far as Beck and his team could tell, the H's seemed to have no trouble with the Nairate authorities. The task force acted cautiously on what learned the agency's one big drug shipment but held back on actions that might jeopardize their surveillance they sensed that they were onto an unusually good case the h's removing a lot of drugs and killing a lot of people they were also careless in their communications even their

dirty calls those in which they discussed criminal activities were rarely hard to decipher i'm trying to there's actually the video of the raid is out there which is the bell the black hawk flying and shooting with the mini gun it's the first like not though there's one from Ovidio Guzman that people mistook because there was a similar one which was this guy and I said you can even maybe put I mean the flashy who's like his hands up

dude I'm telling you this report is like because when you read this actually there you go knew that they're going keep on going keep on going keep on going keep on going still a bunch when when when you read this the article the question then is who had the power in this corrupt relationship was it the drug leader or was it the

general and here you see it's the general It's the general who has the power and the politicians to your point have the power to tell the cartel, you're going to do this. God, we'll just kill you. So how do you solve that problem? I don't know. Because then it's like, there's like a comparison in my head I have, but it's not a perfect comparison. So I don't want to use that. But basically like where the buck stops, it's bad no matter what.

One just has a shield and the other has a fucking, you know, illegally purchased gun, if you will. Yeah. It's the same end result. Yeah, and it's just, that's why, like, you know, you look at the corruption piece. And again, I highly, highly recommend even years ago this article. But it's just such a good investigation. And you read it. And when it comes out of it is, was the enfuego the corrupt dude?

I mean, was the BLO guy, Ache dos, was he the one that controlled the general? Did the general control him? And so then how do you deal with that? Because when you're looking at this, and this is the irony of situation, where you're tracking cartels. You literally have to track, for example, okay, for example, the R5, Riegers, right, Los Reyes, the Cartelos Unidos.

Those military bases are known to support Cartels Unidos against the Mexican, against CGNG. We have footage from Mitzuacan, which is where Cartelos Unidos is based out of, of members of the Cartels Unios, and back then, like the police, and even sometimes the military,

fighting side by side against Kalos Kanu Generation Cartel. So you see that. That happens. So then how do you address these issues? And this is where the problem of the cartel, like solving the cartels. Like, especially where I think in Mencho, for example, and in Maya,io became very powerful,

was in their idea of their power of corruption that they have and how they were able to influence Mexican politicians, right? They were the top of the game. That's why I do believe that. reporting that El Menschel, that Cladis-Shimbun was not aware of Unichel's operation until it was well already on its way, right? And the vetted units were the ones that got intelligence from, that got intelligence from the U.S. to go after this guy. But the question when you're analyzing Mexico is who is corrupt, like who isn't? Yeah. The assumption you should make is everybody in the Mexican

political system is corrupt. And the question then becomes, are they corrupt because they're being beholden by the cartel, or do they hold the cartel hostage? And they happen to just be our biggest trade partner located right on our border, so it's not convenient. We don't, and that's the thing. Like how, like, so, you know, and then, and this is like, you know, I know we talk a lot about the drug trade, but again, like the oil, do you know who was heavily implicated in the oil theft and all that? Warmans.

Well, it was the out in Mexico, in the Mexico side. It was the, the Mexican Navy. Oh. A huge corruption scandal because the Mexican Navy was heavily involved in a lot of the oil theft. That's nice. And so, right, and so, and I think one of the United States. of the models, because when you go to that map, I think one of the differences, when you look at the map in comparison to, you were talking about Narcos Mexico, right? Like the first season, what was it? Like, Wadalajara cartel. Let's send the marijuana. What has fundamentally changed back then to now? Oh, they moved away from marijuana. They went to harder stuff. Well, to me, it's, they went away from the transactional business and they went to the territorial business. That's why we see violence go up. Can you extrapolate upon that?

Yeah. So there's a great book, a good, a good friend of mine. I talk to him regularly. He's a professor, Nathan P. Jones. Great, great guy. And back, all the way back in 2016, he wrote a book. Like, if there's one thing that helped me understand Mexican cartels. And look, if we can give him a shout out.

His book, it's called Mexico Alisted Networks. So Nathan P. Jones book, you can Google it, right? And he wasn't the first. one to come up with it, but he really, that one. From 2016, right? So, phenomenal book. I've cited this so many times. It's one of the books that helped me really frame my understanding of Mexican cartels that

had a huge influence, right? From being like, let's say, doing this as a hobby to doing a little bit more professional to where I'm at, like this was the, in his book, he makes an argument that there's basically two types of cartels. And I wrote an article about this. It's called the militarization of drug cartels in Mexico for a Newsline Institute. I wrote it. I heavily cited his work on that article. And it basically, the argument is the transactional cartel is the Guadalajara cartel. We just want to get marijuana through, right?

Let's, it's a business. Look, everything is a business. Don't get me wrong. But it's more focus on the business model. The way they operate inside of Mexico is this transactional piece of moving drugs. And an example of that, for example, the Quinson Central, perfect example that is the Guadahara cartel, right? And that's where violence wasn't so bad. There's violence, don't get me wrong, but it's not what we see now. The territorial cartel, it's a different type of model and is exemplified by the Zetas. And which it is,

is their whole business model centers on territorial control. Right. And that's how they make their money. Either the drug trade, extortion, you name it, or the passing through the plazas. My argument from this, because he wrote this in 2016, is what we've seen is a transition, all the cartels, because here he kind of talks about

the Sinola cartel in the Federation still being transactional model. My argument is they've all kind of transition. to at least at various degrees, but more so now a territorial focus. Like, there's still transactional piece of drug trade, but the territorial control model is very important within that transactional basis. So that's why what we've seen now

is a militarization of the drug cartels. That's because the territorial model emphasizes control, emphasizes maintaining that power, and you need that militarized force to do it. It's vertical integration effectively. When you have acreage and real estate, you have more area to control and actually set up the stuff

that's gonna pay for the transaction part. I got it, okay. And so that's why we see the drones now being as not. That's why I have a huge problem when I'm talking to like some think tanks and stuff like that. They're like, and sometimes how they frame it is, like they frame it as, oh, it's a law enforcement problem. Oh, it's a, it's crime.

And it's like, do, how many, do you wanna join me in a session of watching decapitation videos and tell me this is a crime problem? Yeah. This isn't. It's, that has long past. Well, that's a think tank for you. You're just in a fucking room and air conditioning,

talking about things happening thousand miles away. Yeah. Where heads are getting chopped like it's just a fucking statistic. Yeah. What else is no? But in the middle of all this, because like we've been alluding to it all day and we talked about it a little bit is the story of the year,

which is the fact that El Mancho is dead. And like we were talking about, I had Kat in here five days after she was walking through the aftermath of what happened at his compound. And it's pretty clear that he is in fact dead, but the sketchiness of the operation and the staginess, if you will, of the scene is certainly questionable. And you have to wonder, like, what is the bigger picture here? What was really happening behind the scene? So now we've had some time to let things settle in and more information to come out.

As best as you can tell, like you said, Claudia Scheimbaum was not notified of this until it was underway. So who was responsible for executing this and what really happened here? I think, you know, is those vetted units, based on the reformatma report, which I do believe, is true. Because the question then, like, why now going after in Mitchell? And I think the argument could be made that if it's that Clyde de Chambon, let's say she authorizes. Like, if you're going to make the argument that she authorized this operation, she was fully aware. The argument is the reason why she do it now is because the Venezuela operation against Maduro, they're like, One of the immediate afterfacts of this was, oh shit, they can do this in Mexico.

Right. We don't want that. That's the last thing we want is like Delta Force or Steel Team 6 or drone strikes or air strikes inside of our country against drug members, right? We don't want that. So the argument that is, let's go after a Mento because he's the biggest fish. He's the big guy. If we can show we can go after him, there's nobody that we can't go after.

There's nobody who's untouchable. And Mentional is the untouchable one. And so you can make that argument. So I think the issue was a lot of it from like that compound and that house that he was at, then T'lapa, what happened was he was fleeing the area and he was executed more in the, like in the forest. I think they executed him. I mean, like, I don't think they even gave him a shot to surrender. Yeah, and you don't think he was dead before.

No, I think that, like, he tried to flee. Because they were saying like he was on dialysis. You know, it's, yeah, so the Elmensch's story is always very interesting that there's always was rumors before this that he was dead because of natural causes and dialysis and all that. No, I think the Mexican, and the reason why we also know that this wasn't necessarily stage is, I mean, C.J&G went on a war path afterwards. For a day. Yeah. Still, they killed, well, they killed, what, 28? They killed a lot, but again, that, unfortunately, and I hate to say it this way, unfortunately, that's a quick statistic.

Correct. But it was still very significant, even for, because I, remember when we were talking earlier in this episode, when they do narco placates, and I said, I kind of, the exception is Almenchal. Because they don't necessarily do it for retaliation. They do it to enable a leader to get out. Here they did it as retaliation. It's very interesting they killed 28 Mexican National Guard soldiers afterwards. But obviously there's an understanding in the CD&G that we can't do this long term, right? Because a cartel is not there to replace the government.

They're not. They need the government. Again, like when they get arrested, they need the government. Like, hey, judges. Well, if there's no government, you can't get arrested. That is the other argument. Well, but they're not going to provide like water services to the people. Now, they'll do hearts and minds, but they're not going to run like the normal day-to-day government bureaucracist.

That is mean. P-S-E-N-G, brought you by the fucking cartel. Exactly. Yeah, sponsored by CJ&G. You know, that was in the soccer games. But what would... But for in Menthal, right, when he was killed, the question then became, okay, who's going to take over? Because the fact that he would...

His death is what caused all this violence to occur throughout Mexico. Because it literally happened in every single state that CG&G controlled, right? And one of the arguments, for example, Primito, how you can say he's CGNG, because his territory in reignoso Tamuipas, also had narco blockades as a response. So then the question then became, because I do believe he was executed, who was going to take over? And there was really three, maybe four contenders. It was number one was always going to be zero three, his top son, who's an American citizen. Yeah. And he's, and what's very interesting about him is he comes from Los Coenis.

The Queenies, the Guanzas de Valencia family. which they're the money holders. Yep. Right? So you had O3, who was the stepson. You had El Cardinero, El Sapo, and then maybe,

maybe Doublerre, right? Who's the guy from Guanajuato. It really, it really was going to be 0.3. If you were going to put me a gun to my head and say, who were the top three contenders, I was going to say,

O3, and then I was going to have a hard time if you were a cardiner or the sapo. El Cardinero, if there's one man who can break C.G and cause like a Sinolaolaa cartel civil war and break off and do his own thing as El Jardinero. Yeah. Right? Not El Sapo. El Sapa won't do that.

El Jardiner, I can see that. Why do you say that with him? His rise was very significant, very pronounced and very, very well documented. And what was interesting is under him, he formed a very strong lieutenant named El Serio. El Serio And that guy was starting to spread He was in Guerrero

And then he was a Moralec Because Cardinero's base of operation was Nayarita and Jalisco And then you had After the Chapito CJNGG Alliance Then he sent his guys to Sinaloa And then he had his top lieutenant

Expanding Guerrero and Morales Okay Holy shit That's a lot of places That's a lot Right And you can tell that he is ambition He was an ambitious man

he was an ambitious man and there was conversations after Adementia was killed would Carranato accept anybody but him? Well, I got a source I think like less than a day after Edmento was killed a source of mine within

CJNG told me like no, no, it's 03, he's the leader he's going to be the he's the new leader we're all understanding that he's the new leader of Holoscan New Generation Cartel you text him like who's the leader fam? Yeah, literally. Literally. I was like,

yeah man. I'm like, who is it? I have a tweet. Congratulations. Like, you could look up on X, like the first, like the, I literally tweeted it, like the first one. And it was funny because after I tweeted it, like, everybody apparently literally got copied and pasted kind of my tweet. We're like, so everybody has CGNGG sources? Yeah, you got to be able to watermark if it's a tweet.

Because I told them. And it's from somebody that is reliable. I know. And he knows the inner workings of CGNGG pretty well. Actually, he gave me a tip before the CG&G Chapito's video. was coming out that they formally announced the alliance. He said, hey, there's a video coming out later today announcing this alliance being able to look at it like six hours later

is when I saw it. So that's why does he want to tell you that? Because I think he, because then it's like an influence game because then if I share his content, it's kind of like in a way where he can be like, see, I'm also important and influential within the organization. It's kind of, you know, he's going to do it. And, you know, but at the many aspects,

cartel members, but just like anybody, like, why does somebody, why do you have sources that pass you information? Right. You know, just sometimes they, I'm not going to question it. I just have to validate it. Yeah. And so when 03 was announced as a leader, it was very interesting that it does appear to be in agreement. But again, the capture of Cardinado was like, I mean, I know they're after him.

Maybe the U.S. was going after him. The Mexican was obviously going after him. He was a priority target. But was there like some additional intel that came out from a source that were like, we don't want to deal with C.G? We don't want to deal with El Cardinero. We don't want to deal with him breaking off and doing his own thing. You know, and so that was a very interesting dynamic, but, you know, the key thing about Gillesquinoe Generation Cartel now is that the leader of Et al-Tres comes from Los Queenies.

And what's important about the Queenie. When I say we're going to control the money, I don't think people understand what I mean by that. They control the money. Yeah, please explain. It's like a Rockefellers. if you were to grab every single Mexican pesoine dollar that the Queenie's have ever touched in Mexico, and you were to remove it out of the Mexican financial system,

the Mexican economy collapses overnight. There's a reason why people say, go after the money. He just said, look at the sanctions that the U.S. has imposed on Mexican financial institutions. I think the total value is less than $15 billion. That's a joke. We're not going to go after the actual finance, all of them. We can't.

We'll collapse the Mexican. And to your point, they're our largest training partner. We're not going to do that. It fucks us up. We're not, no. That's insane. Wake up people. Go after the money.

It's easier said than done. You cannot touch the Queenie's money that well. And El Quini di El Quini is sitting in U.S. prison. Right? But that family has always controlled the money. And so now the stepson, the reason why El Mentionro is probably as powerful as he is, is because of El Quini's mom, wife, who comes from that family. And now the interesting aspect, the CG and GNG is now under the...

So the guy, El Mento controlled the guns and the Quinnis controlled the money. El Mento was always the top dog. Don't get me wrong. He wasn't necessarily running the day-to-day. That was actually more 03. He was the one who was running the day-to-day. That's the suspicion. But there was an interesting dynamic, was he losing influence to El Cardinero, for example,

or even at Sapo, that they can challenge him. Clearly not. But now we have CG, the guy who controls the gun and the guy who controls the money is the same person. It's the same family now. So now it's, would you say they're in a healthy position as a cartel organization post-El Mencho? They've gone through the hardest days of like a post-leadership change at this point. I think the worst case scenario is already past them. I think the cardinero aspect is very interesting.

The fact that after Cardinero was. captured another C.G, the source of mine from C. G. G. N.G. told me El Serio and another guy, one of his cousins, but really, El Serio, is took control of El Cardinero's overall faction. So he's now in charge, but he's not at the level of El Cardinero. Right? There's no dispute that he's not at the same level. And so I think those are the aspects. I know we were talking this off air, like the el-yogood. Like people were, it's like, okay, when, because we're after adventure. He was fun too. He was, you know, he's still active. He's very active. He's very So it's very funny because I remember saying,

El Yogurt caught my attention because he always was based out of Michoacan. After Mention was captured for some, I think it started as a joke and people ran with it that he was going to be the new leader CJs. He's like, no, no, ladies and gentlemen, no he's not. He's not even top 10 most powerful in Mexico, right? El Tio Laco, another name in Mishuacan

is more influential than Yorgut. But what's very interesting about a yogurt is he started out of Michokan and then he expanded his operations in Quintan Arirang. and Cosumel, which is like the opposite coast. Like, wait, Michoacan, Quintana Ro, Cosumel, Cancun.

Okay, that's interesting. Like way out there, right? Generally, how factions work, they're like, they're connected. Then there was reporting that he also had a base of operation in Colima. Okay, Colima, Michoacan, that makes sense, sure. Cosumel, hmm, that's interesting. When, shortly after the Chapito lines was announced, and Hardinero went in, and I actually remember talking this in another episode,

and Jardino went in. One of the things I started to notice was, is this a situation where Jardineros getting too much power? Because he not only does he control Nayarita in Halesco and now through his subordinates, Guerrero and now Paziris later on, but now he's active in Sinaloa with Los Chapitos. What was interesting,

there was reporting from accounts based on Michoacan that el-Yoghout was sent to Sinaloa. And what caught my attention was, I kind of speculated, Did they do that because they didn't want Hardinero to be the only one that controls the Jose and Aloha cartels of a war fight? So they put somebody else in there to be like,

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're finding, you know, we're both a good generation cartels but it's like, hey, yogurt, no, no, no, you're also going to be very active. And some of the reporting I got is that his fighters were actually concentrated in Kuyakhan, one of his factions called, I think it's called the Dissieckan, they're very much centered in Kuliacan,

which is the capital, like that's the Chapito's Heartland. And so it's kind of like this, almost like you can make this argument like this Praetorian Guard in a way, but in a way to tell the Cardinero guys like, no, no, no, no, we're here. What's interesting about Yogurt, though, is that him and Primito, the other guy would say,

hate each other, despise each other. And I think the reason is... So their factions, obviously, hate each other too. I mean, obviously, I'm not going to say it vocally on Instagram, I think from a leadership, and I think the reason why is because I think Yogurt, again, who's not in the contender of the top leader, I think the interesting aspect is Primito's influence

within Colorscuner Generation cartel is that personal relationship with a mentor. But even before he was killed, they hated each other. And I think the reason why Brimito hated him was because Jogu was rising in power. But he was able to do that outside of deploying his forces. I mean, because he was deploying his forces, not through personal relation. What was interesting is El METRO then deployed forces to Zakattecas to support El Sapo. And so it's all these internal cartel dynamics, specific of those Nusun's Generation cartel,

that you can see how it can get very complicated. With El Mention, it can kind of break down. But luckily, for 03, it's kind of stabilized and stay the same. Seeing as we just saw for the first time, an administration in the United States declare the cartels a terrorist threat and organization, which allows them to legally potentially do some other interesting things down there. You know, we haven't seen an all-out war happen from the United States.

against these organizations there, despite the powers that they've now granted themselves. So I ask you sitting in here in 2026 with another, I guess, two and a half years in this administration, do you think that the abilities of the United States government that have now been temporarily at least granted to them by declaring these organizations, terrorist organizations, will have put a major, major damper on the power that these organizations have in Mexico? by the time Trump leaves office in 2029? If it continues as we're seeing now and the only strikes we're seeing against these like speedboats, then no.

So in what scenario, would it make a big impact? I mean, that's the thing. I mean, look, I don't want, I don't want to, the reason why we do the King Cunuch strategy and the military strategy because really is the only tool that we have available to do and is to do something and even the Mexicans do it and they have to do it.

Again, it's like, oh, go after the money. Again, easier said than done. I mean, I think that, I think from, if you're, if you're analyzing this from a terrorism declaration perspective and it's just that, then no. If you start combining that with severe targeting of Mexican corruption, now we're talking. Which would include like some sort of sanctioning in the financial system or things of those types. And targeting the leadership of Mexico, like the political leadership, right? But the problem of Mexico is the most effective anti-corruption body in.

Mexico is the Southern District of New York. That's a long way from Mexico. But the Mexicans aren't going to solve it. So do you force them to take that into consideration? Look, I think, in the end of the day, what I would say to do, I think the best case scenario we can look at, and a lot of people have said this, is the best case for Mexico, it ends up like Colombia. You're not going to eliminate them.

But we reduce the violence. It's manageable. You know, now cocaine production in Colombia skyrocketing causing problem, but that's obviously the thing with President Petro, but can you get a situation where maybe that's reduced? But in the situation, Colombia is kind of somewhat more manageable and you're really interdicting drugs, et cetera, right? I think that's the best case that you can look at for Mexico.

Is the military, the conduit to do it? I mean, there's certain, I mean, look, the Mexicans are doing that Kedorians are doing the Colombians, do it. Everybody does it. Everybody uses the military to go after. And in many aspects, you do have to go out. You have to utilize the military because Mexican cartels, the last estimate we have, control at least fully, fully control, fully control.

33% of Mexico is under cartel, absolute control. That's just like them controlling the territory. No government, no nothing. They control a third of Mexico. Now let's expand that with strong influence where you see gunmen's of cartel members side by side with the police. Yeah, good luck.

So you can look at it in a sense like, okay, there's wait. Now, again, the drug strikes against drug boats, I don't think it's necessarily I'm going to damp it. What you're going to encourage is, I think, what we saw in Spain, that's, you know,

but now they're going to put in container vessels. We've already started to see that as well. So, you know, it causes problem. But you can weaken it. Is it going to be done? done in two years, that's, for me, is kind of hard to see. Is it possible? Sure. But just as the Mexican cartels kind of took over to the Colombian cartels, if you want to say who I think might take over if the Mexican cartels weakened from a global international perspective is the Brazilian gangs.

Oh, we can't even touch that right now, dude. We're three hours getting it's in. But that's for the next one. The Brazilian gangs are no fucking joke, man. Finally, finally the Wall Street Journal, but I've been screaming this through the top of my lungs for a long time. The Wall Street Journal wrote a great article about that, like specifically PCC, but PCC and Red Commando are the two ones that I would be looking at that can, just as Sinolaa cartel and CGM are not only the most powerful Mexican drug cartels in Mexico, they're the most powerful criminal organizations in the world. If they start getting weekend, the ones that I would be looking at are the Brazilian games led by

those two, yeah. That's a whole different ball game right there. Stefano, you're awesome, man. You're a great follow on X. I would say Twitter, but X as well. And anything else you want link down there, let me know so that people can find you wherever you are. But we're going to have to do this again, my friend. Awesome.

Thank you so much. It was great. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Hey, guys.

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